THE EFFECT OF SUB-COOLING ON REFRIGERATION PROCESSES

The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief description of a well known mechanism to increase a refrigeration system's overall efficiency called sub-cooling. Sub-cooling increases the system's efficiency by reducing compressor power and increasing the system's refrigeration effect. Simply stated, sub-cooling lessens the amount of energy that is required to operate a refrigeration system and, therefore, realizes a cost savings to the operator. A rule of thumb is that for every 2oF of sub-cooling, the system operating cost is reduced by one percent 1%. There are various traditional methods to achieve sub-cooling all, of which require additional parasitic power and can only achieve a 5 to 10 of sub-cooling effect. However, Clarus Energy can provide up to 50oF of sub-cooling with our cogeneration systems. Cogeneration is a well known and widely used electrical generation cycle that includes heat recovery from an engine and demonstrates an overall system efficiency as high as 80%. There are several types of heat recovery methods, however, for the purpose of this paper, we are focused on hot water or steam heat recovery that is, in turn, used to fire an absorption chiller. The chiller produces cold water down to about 42oF. For this application, chilled water is used to sub-cool liquid refrigerant after it leaves the condenser. An energy savings of between 5 to 25% can be realized and is dependant upon condensing and evaporator temperatures of the refrigeration system. Due to theses physical dependencies, each refrigeration system must be evaluated on its own merit. The installation of a chilled water sub-cooling system on operating refrigeration facilities can be accomplished with minimal downtime. A piping spool piece that includes a by-pass valve in the main refrigerant line and two shut off valves for the sub-cooling heat exchanger can be constructed ahead of the actual refrigeration system shut-down period so that the tie-in can be completed with minimal downtime. Depending upon the size of the system, tie-ins can be completed from 4 to 8 hours during off-peak periods.

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