Drives For Industrial Refrigeration And Industrial Cooling Applications

Andy Pye looks at how variable speed drives help keep things like food and medicine cool in industrial refrigeration applications.

For around 200 years, refrigeration technologies have progressively aided the provision of essential goods and services, such as:

• Food preservation
• Medical processes
• District heating and cooling

The industry was scarred by well-documented negative environmental impacts as a result of harmful refrigerants depleting the ozone layer with links to global warming. Following the signing of the Montreal and Kyoto protocols, significant progress was made, reducing the production by 90% of CFCs, HCFCs and HFCs between 1988 and 2005.

However, with the world population expected to grow to 9 billion between now and 2050 and with longer life expectancy, consumption of all resources relating to refrigeration-related processes mean demand will increase hugely.

Energy usage usually provides the biggest cost centre for any refrigeration plant. Already, energy consumption of refrigeration equipment represents 15% of global electricity use (often over 20% in developed countries). Most countries still produce electricity using fossil fuels and so this underlines a further huge impact on global warming due to the use of refrigeration equipment.

Therefore, there is an urgent need to:

• Improve the coefficient of performance (COP) of refrigeration equipment (in other words, reduce the electricity consumption per unit).
• Build more integrated and highly controlled systems of energy consumption in a whole building.
• Switch to new refrigerants that do not harm the ozone layer or emit CO2.
• Increase global coverage of highly efficient refrigeration solutions that embrace best practices.

Many refrigeration and air conditioning systems require reliable processes which are more efficient, compact, environmental friendly, easy to install and to maintain. The cooling requirements vary over a wide range during the day and over the year due to such factors as ambient conditions, occupancy and use, and lighting.

There may also be the need for a stable and accurate temperature and humidity control in areas such as hospitals, IT and telecoms. In applications such as schools, restaurants and office buildings, it is important that the cooling system is able to adapt to wide daily shifts in load.

In process cooling applications such as fermentation, growing tunnels and industrial processes, accurate temperature settings are required to secure production quality.

Read More: https://www.theautomationengineer.com/technical/drives-for-industrial-refrigeration-and-industrial-cooling-applications
Related Article: Cool Considerations for Refrigeration