At 02:55 PM 6/28/2015, Jim Felder wrote: >Historical aside: The ammonia cycle refrigerator as we know it was invented >by Dr. Carl von Linde, who made fortune selling his ice-making machinery >around the world. He was the professor of theoretical engineering at the >prestigious Polytechnikum in Munich at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian >was in 1870. A German boy whose family had fled Paris because they were >politically undesirable became his star student and went on to become world >famous in his on right. His name was Rudolph Diesel. There's some confusion here. Linde invented a refrigeration cycle using ammonia, and the Linde company is still big in both refrigeration and ammonia. But it's a compressor-type phase-change cycle similar to the ones using Freons. That's the cycle used in commercial refrigeration and icemaking plants, not the absorption cycle. The compression cycle moves about five times as much heat per unit of input energy, but it requires a motorized compressor. Ammonia gas is an excellent refrigerant and quite inexpensive, but it's a bit nasty to keep around the house in a system with pumps and seals. Since fridges etc now use hermetically sealed systems I don't know why Freon is preferred -- may well have to do with the necessary pressures. The three-gas absorption cycle used by Servel, Electrolux, Dometic was developed in 1922 by a couple students at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology and commercialized the following year. Yrs, d |
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