Article | REF: BE9755 V2

Industrial applications of refrigeration . General

Author: Christophe MARVILLET

Publication date: October 10, 2016, Review date: October 15, 2021

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Overview

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ABSTRACT

Refrigerating a material or a process consists in lowering its temperature to below ambient. This endothermic process can involve a variety of technological devices. It also assumes a process temperature somewhere between absolute zero and room temperature. The traditional areas of refrigeration are air conditioning for comfort, for the correct functioning of sophisticated industrial equipment, and for the processing and storage of food, and in the transformation of chemical or mechanical products by cooling, condensation, freezing, crystallisation, etc. Some other applications include ice-making for food preservation or cooling processes, ice rinks and artificial snow production.

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AUTHOR

Christophe MARVILLET: Professor at the CNAM (Conservatoire national des arts et metiers) - IFFI-CNAM (Institut français du froid industriel et du génie climatique) Paris, France

INTRODUCTION

We define the term "refrigeration of a body, process..." as the process of lowering the temperature of this product or process below ambient temperature.

So, by definition, refrigeration of a product or process involves :

a process of absorbing the heat supplied by the product or process to be cooled. This endothermic process may involve a variety of technological devices and a wide range of fluids, both for producing the cold and for transporting the "cold" between the place of production and the place of use;
a process temperature level between absolute zero and ambient temperature: to take account of the wide range of conditions of use and "cold" production associated with these temperatures, a distinction is made in the remainder of this article between two refrigeration modes:
- mechanical refrigeration, which is generally produced by traditional refrigeration machines with compression cycles whose usual temperature range is between – 50 and 10 °C or absorption or adsorption cycles whose temperature ranges are close to [BE 9 733][BE 9 740][BE 9 741][BE 9 742][BE 9 743]