HISTORY AND APPLICATION OF REFRIGERATION

Refrigeration
What is refrigeration?
Refrigeration is defined as the process of achieving and maintaining a temperature below that of the
surroundings, the aim being to cool some product or space to the required temperature.

History of refrigeration
History of refrigeration is long and refrigeration changed along the way from the pretty primitive yet ingenious
to modern technology which allowed people to have refrigerators in their house and not depend on nature.
Refrigerators may look like mundane machines that everyone has in their home and that work on simple
physical laws that work since the beginning of time but that is not all that can be said about them

History of refrigeration broadly divided into two category :

1) Age of Natural refrigeration : -From pre-historic times to the beginning of 19th century
2) Age of artificial refrigeration: - form 19th century onward

Age of Natural Refrigeration

In olden days refrigeration was achieved by natural means such as the use of ice or evaporative cooling.
In earlier times, ice was either:
1. Transported from colder regions,
2. Harvested in winter and stored in ice houses for summer use
3. Produced by nocturnal cooling

Chinese harvested ice from rivers and lakes as early as 1.000 BC. They even had religious ceremonies for filling
and emptying ice cellars. Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans placed large amounts of snow into storage pits and
covered it insulating material like grass, chaff, or branches of trees. They used these pits as well as snow to cool
beverages.
Before 1830, few Americans used ice to refrigerate foods due to a lack of ice-storehouses and iceboxes. As
these two things became more widely available, individuals used axes and saws to harvest ice for their
storehouses. This method proved to be difficult, dangerous, and certainly did not resemble anything that could
be duplicated on a commercial scale.
Nocturnal cooling
In this method ice was made by keeping a thin layer of water in a shallow earthen tray, and then exposing the
tray to the night sky.
Egyptians and ancient people of India would moisten the outside of the jars and the resulting evaporation
would cool the water that was inside of the jars. The first group of people to use cold storage to preserve food
was Persians.

Evaporative cooling

As the name indicates, evaporative cooling is

the process of reducing the temperature of a
system by evaporation of water.
Evaporative cooling has been used in India
for centuries to obtain cold water in summer
by storing the water in earthen potsThe water
permeates through the pores of earthen vessel
to its outer surface where it evaporates to the
surrounding, absorbing its latent heatin part
from the vessel, which cools the water

Ice harvesting was for centuries the only

method of food refrigeration.
In 18th century England, servants collected ice in the winter and were putting it into icehouses. Icehouses were
places where the sheets of ice were packed in salt, wrapped in flannel, and stored underground to keep them
frozen until summer. In the 19th century, the first ice boxes started appearing in England. At that time, the first
commercial ice started appearing with spreading of ice-storehouses and iceboxes. Frederic Tudor started
harvesting ice in New England and shipping it to the Caribbean islands and to the southern states. At first he
had ice wastage of 66% but with better insulated ships he reduced the waste to 8%. He expanded ice market
and by the early 1830s ice became a mass-market commodity.
Harvesting of ice was difficult and dangerous so people tried to invent artificial ways of refrigeration.

Artificial cooling
Refrigeration as it is known these days is produced by artificial means.
The history of artificial refrigeration began in the year 1755, The first one to make a
breakthrough was Scottish professor William Cullen who designed a small refrigerating
machine in 1755. He used a pump to create a partial vacuum over a container of diethyl
ether. With that, he lowered its boiling point and diethyl ether boiled. That reaction
absorbed heat from the surroundings. This effect even produced a small amount of
ice, but the process was not yet practical and could be not used commercially. But it
was a start and all other experiments and ideas originate from this.

In 1758, Benjamin Franklin and John Hadley, professor of chemistry, collaborated on a project investigating
the principle of evaporation as a means to rapidly cool an object at Cambridge University, England. They
confirmed that the evaporation of highly volatile liquids, such as alcohol and ether, could be used to drive down
the temperature of an object past the freezing point of water.
 John Hadley Benjamin Franklin

American Oliver Evans designed refrigerator in 1805 which was based on a closed cycle of compressed ether.
Design stayed in prototype stage.
In 1805 an American inventor, Oliver Evans, designed the first refrigeration machine that used vapour instead
of liquid based on a closed cycle of compressed ether. Design stayed in prototype stageand Evans never
constructed his machine.
A similar attempt was made in 1842, by American physician, John Gorrie, who built a working prototype, but
it was a commercial failure.

American engineer Alexander Twining took out a British patent in 1850 for a vapor compression system that
used ether, Alexan der Twinning began selling a refrigeration machine based on this principle in 1856
Shortly afterward James Harrison, a Scottish Australian built The first practical vapor compression
refrigeration system His 1856 patent was for a vapor compression system using ether, alcohol or ammonia. He
built a mechanical ice-making machine in 1851 on the banks of the Barwon River at Rocky Point
in Geelong, Victoria, and his first commercial ice-making machine followed in 1854. Harrison also introduced
commercial vapor-compression refrigeration to breweries and meat packing houses, and by 1861, a dozen of
his systems were in operation.

A somewhat more complex system was developed by Ferdinand Carré of France in 1859. Unlike earlier
vapour-compression machines, which used air as a coolant, Carré’s equipment contained rapidly
expanding ammonia. (Ammonia liquefies at a much lower temperature than water and is thus able to absorb
more heat.) Carré’s refrigerators were widely used, and vapour-compression refrigeration became, and still is,
the most widely used method of cooling but it had bad smell and was poisonous when it leaked so it wasn’t
used for long.

Ferdinand Carré
Carl von Linde, an engineering professor at the Technological University Munich in Germany, patented an
improved method of liquefying gases in 1876. His new process made possible the use of gases such
as ammonia (NH3), sulfur dioxide (SO2) and methyl chloride (CH3Cl) as refrigerants and they were widely used
for that purpose until the late 1920s.

In 1913, refrigerators for home and domestic use were invented by Fred W. Wolf of Fort Wayne, Indiana, with
models consisting of a unit that was mounted on top of an ice box

In 1914, engineer Nathaniel B. Wales of Detroit, Michigan, introduced an idea for a practical electric
refrigeration unit, which later became the basis for the Kelvinator.
A self-contained refrigerator, with a compressor on the bottom of the cabinet was invented by Alfred
Mellowes in 1916. Mellowes produced this refrigerator commercially but was bought out by William C.
Durant in 1918, who started the Frigidaire company to mass-produce refrigerators. In 1918, Kelvinator
company introduced the first refrigerator with any type of automatic control.

In 1918, Kelvinator company introduced the first refrigerator with any type of automatic control.
 The absorption refrigerator was invented by Baltzar von Platen and Carl Munters from Sweden in 1922, while
they were still students at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. It became a worldwide success and
was commercialized by Electrolux. There was a 1922 model that consisted of a wooden cold box, water-
cooled compressor, an ice cube tray and a 9-cubic-foot (0.25 m3) compartment, and cost $714. (A 1922 Model-
T Ford cost about $450.)

The first refrigerator to see widespread use was the General Electric "Monitor-Top" refrigerator introduced in
1927 so-called because of its resemblance to the gun turret on the ironclad warship USS Monitor of the
1860s.Over a million units were produced. As the refrigerating medium, these refrigerators used either sulfur
dioxide, which is corrosive to the eyes and may cause loss of vision, painful skin burns and lesions, or methyl
formate, which is highly flammable, harmful to the eyes, and toxic if inhaled or ingested. Many of these units
are still functional today, after requiring little more service than a replacement start relay or thermostat if at all.
These cooling systems cannot legally be recharged with the hazardous original refrigerants if they leak or break
down
The introduction of Freon in the 1920s expanded the refrigerator market during the 1930s and provided a safer,
low boiling point, surface tension, and viscosity which makes it an ideal refrigerant.

Separate freezers became common during the 1940s; the popular term at the time for the unit was a deep freeze.
These devices, or appliances, did not go into mass production for use in the home until after World War II.

The 1950s and 1960s saw technical advances like automatic defrosting and automatic ice making.
More efficient refrigerators were developed in the 1970s and 1980s, however, Freon(R-12) damaged the ozone
layer, causing governments to issue a ban on its use in new refrigerators and air-conditioning systems in 1994.
The less harmful replacement for R-12, R-134a (tetrafluoroethane), has been in common use since 1990, but
R-12 is still found in many old systems today.

At present refrigeration technology has continued to improve over the years refrigerators are currently
emvironment friendly by using cfc free coolants and consume less energy than their predecessors by using
more efficient cooling systems