Refrigerators have made our life much more comfortable with preserving food, but how does it work? There’s a complete science behind it and a series of stepwise procedures behind it. Every refrigerator works in the same way; either it’s china refrigerant gas or any other electrical appliance.
In this comprehensive post, you’ll learn all about refrigeration, how it works, and the types of refrigerators used for different applications.
Spare a minute to go through this post, and you’ll learn what retains the freshness of our daily food items. First, take a look; how does a refrigerator work?
How Refrigerator Work?
The refrigeration is quite simple; to fathom the principle behind it, always remember that when the liquid evaporates, it absorbs heat, and when liquid condenses, it releases heat. A simple example is when a hand is wet; it feels cold; this is the process of water evaporating and cooling your hand on a very humid hot day; your frosty beer will have water condensing on the outside of the bottle.
This warms your beer to pull off this frosty feat. A refrigerator uses five major compartments;
- An expansion device
- Evaporator coils
- Compressor
- Condenser coils
- Refrigerant
The refrigerant is liquid that enters the expansion as it passes through the sudden pressure drop, making it expand, calm, and turn into gas. As the refrigerant flows around the evaporator coil, it absorbs and removes heat from the food inside.
The blower crushes the refrigerant raising its temperature and pressing factor. It’s now a hot, high-pressure gas. The refrigerant then flows through condenser coils on the back of the fridge, radiating its heat to the atmosphere and cooling back into a liquid as it does. So, the refrigerant then re-enters the expansion device, and the cycle repeats itself.
Heat is continuously picked up from the inside of the refrigerator and taken outside of it. Now, let’s move to refrigerant types.
Refrigerant Types
The refrigerant types are divided into categories like previous refrigerants, current refrigerants, and future refrigerants. Some of the names and numbers you’ll find with these and pros and cons primarily the environmental being the ozone destruction, and global warming protection of these.
If you’re working in HVAC or even building services, you first need to learn the basics of refrigerants and basic refrigerant types. When it comes to talking about refrigerants, we talk about a fluid that can quickly evaporate and condense continuously, so these are used in refrigeration and air conditioning systems.
Now, some of the historical and current main types of refrigerants fall into the following categories;
- CFCs – the CFCSs stands for Chlorofluorocarbons
- HCFCs – It stands for Hydro-Chloro-Fluoro-Carbons
- HFC’s – The HF represents Hydro Fluoro Carbons
Here we can see why these acronyms are frequently used because these names are horrendously long, and no one can pronounce the complete name easily; here’s it’s wide to refer them with initials. Each set makes the combination with carbon.
The types of refrigerant gas mentioned above actually belonged to the previous era, in which CFC was banned for environmental protection. The most used refrigerant types currently used include R22 and r12 freeze; you’ll also come across the r134a, r410a, R 20 freeze, etc.
All of these have been replaced soon in the future due to their effects on the environment. Thus, if you’re working in the industry, or studying to get into this industry, then later in your career, you’ll experience a significant transition over to the next generation of refrigerants.
However, the essential thing here is what R means in r22, r10, and other such freezing types? Well, the R stands for refrigerant, and numbers quantify how many of each atom they have. The molecule with different digits means different at a minute structure, while the little letter at the end shows how symmetrical the isomer symmetry is.
Let’s take an example of r134a, molecule; it has two carbon atoms, so this indicating just out of blank scale, B or C shows it is relatively symmetrical; A, if it were completely balanced, then it would be empty.
The market is heading to future generation refrigerants today, which will be environment friendly with good thermodynamic properties. In other words, the market is heading through two routes; one is natural, including carbon dioxide, ammonia, more problematic hydrocarbons; all these have shallow global warming protection and have excellent thermodynamic properties as well.
Since they’re natural, so also cheap for the manufacturer.
The other route market is heading towards is, route of HF-o-s’; these are stepping in to replace many of HFCS as these have much lower global warming potential, and they didn’t destroy the atmosphere of ozone.
Some of the refrigerants are toxic, and some are non-toxic. Let’s take an insight into refrigerant gases.
Explaining Refrigerant Gases
As we discussed above, the three types of fluorocarbon refrigerant gases are widely used in refrigeration. Now, HFO is joining HSPS as the fluorocarbon gases of choice for a wide range of applications.
The full fluorocarbon gases have different environmental properties; first, take CFCs. The CFCS refrigerant gas was invented in the 1930s as a replacement for toxic or highly flammable refrigerants. First, this gas was assumed safe; then later, it was discovered harmful because first, the molecule was very stable in the atmosphere, then it reached the ozone layer where they would break down chlorine of CFC will deplete the ozone.
Due to some other reasons, the CFCs were replaced by HDFCs that contains hydrogen which made them less stable in an atmosphere so that it can break down more quickly, yet it also needed to be phased out to let ozone layer recover.
Then comes a required refrigerant which shouldn’t contain chlorine, but few properties of CFCs and HCFCs non-flammable with low-toxicity and good technical performance enter HF. These fluorocarbons, which could be readily produced and applied, had no impact on the ozone layer.
It was known that HS fees had a global warming potential as they can accumulate in the atmosphere, yet it was lower than BS b. Therefore, a lot of emphases was put on secure containment so that gases can be recycled.
