Carbon Dioxide: The future for a Cooler World
Will your next car have carbon dioxide air conditioning? For the last 30 years American academics and climate ‘experts’ have gotten away with telling us that carbon dioxide is a dangerous warming gas, a hazard to life. But in the real world engineers and applied scientists use carbon dioxide every day to keep us cool, grow better crops and refrigerate products. Indeed, CO2 is nature’s best cooling gas! Ask Mercedes Benz!
Thankfully, the voice of the sanity is getting heard – the truth is coming out and anti-science groups are furious. For instance, groupthink academics who claim that carbon dioxide is a global warming gas seem oblivious to the fact conventional refrigerants i.e. hydrofluorocarbons cause about 1,400 times more ‘global warming potential’ than the same quantity of cooling carbon dioxide.
It is becoming clear that these man-made synthetic gases are poor substitutes for the very best natural and safe alternative – carbon dioxide.
As many countries are phasing out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs)—the dominant refrigerants in recent years, chemical experts in industry are saying CO2 is one substance that could serve as an alternative.
CO2 was first patented as a refrigerant in Great Britain in 1850. By 1869, an American, Thaddeus S.C. Lowe, had built a refrigeration system that was used on board a ship to transport meat from Texas to New York.
Today, CO2’s most common applications are in cold storage, supermarket refrigeration systems, and industrial, commercial, and domestic heat pumps.
Eckhard Groll, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue says:
“Carbon dioxide is promising for systems that must be small and light-weight, such as automotive or portable air conditioners. Various factors, including the high operating pressure required for carbon-dioxide systems, enable the refrigerant to flow through small-diameter tubing, which allows engineers to design more compact air conditioners.”
“It was actually very heavily used as a refrigerant in human-occupied spaces, such as theaters and restaurants, and it did a great job,” says Groll, who chaired the Gustav Lorentzen Conference on Natural Working Fluids. Groll’s work is funded by the U.S. Army, Air Force and the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers.
Even the biggest names in world refrigeration technology agree the future is carbon dioxide:
“Danfoss believes that CO2 will be the main refrigerant in multipack commercial refrigeration systems. The F-gas regulation is a clear push in this direction.”
An important study by Alberto Cavallini of the Department of Technical Physics, University of Padova, Italy spills the beans about how safe and beneficial CO2 is – it and does the opposite of what climate ‘experts’ claim.
Cavallini reports:
“In the beginnings of mechanical refrigeration, at the end of the nineteenth century, Carbon Dioxide was one of the first refrigerants to be used in compression type refrigerating machines, later gaining widespread application mainly onboard of refrigerated ships, but common in other sectors of refrigeration as well.
It was only immediately after World War II that CO2 rapidly eclipsed as a refrigerant, due to the advent of the synthesised halogenated working fluids, addressed as safe and ideal refrigerants at that time.”
Worldwide hype about the ‘ozone hole’ in the 1970’s changed the game. To some, the alarmism about and HCFC was built on similar junk science that feeds into global warming alarm.
But the irony is that due to the scare about these man-made gases in the environment, industry and applied science has come back to CO2 – the best natural gas proven to have unrivalled cooling ability.
Mercedes Benz Unveils CO2 Car Aircon
Jumping on the carbon cooling bandwagon is the world’s premier executive car builder: Mercedes Benz. Their new 2017 E-class has self-driving capabilities, electronic safety aids and an important feature: the new CO2 air-conditioning system. One automotive news story reports:
“The Society of Automotive Engineers hasn’t yet adopted a CO2 standard, although it will be “considered and evaluated.”
While Cavallini adds:
“HFC’s and other such working fluids are now phased out of use in Europe under EU Regulation 2037/2000. The Global Warming environmental issue casts concern over the use of the new HFC fluids as substitute refrigerants, because of their high GWP values, which make them subject to regulations under the Kyoto Protocol.”
Now research establishments in Europe, Japan and North America, are working hard to bring to market new products using CO2 that confound all the false claims.
“Important results have already been reached in exploiting the peculiar characteristics of this gas, In some applications CO2 systems have been already commercialised; this yields for heat pump water heaters, as a brine in indirect systems and in the low temperature stage of cascade systems.”
“Carbon dioxide has important applications in many areas such as air conditioning and heat pump systems in the residential and commercial sectors,commercial and transport refrigeration and mobile air conditioning”
But the truth is that this isn’t a huge revelation. Old Physics books report that carbon dioxide was solidified for the first time in 1835 by the French physicist Thilorier, and in turn used as a cooling agent (dry ice) to solidify mercury.
In 1867 the American inventor Lowe described how carbon dioxide could be used in refrigeration: Franz Windhausen from Brunswick in Germany, in 1886 patented a compressor or a carbon dioxide refrigerating machine. The following year the British Company J&E Hall bought a licence to build a CO2 compressor from Windhausen himself. The same Company built the first two-stage CO2 compressor as well (Cavallini and Steimle 1998).
This can be considered the starting point of the extended use of carbon dioxide as a working fluid in mechanical refrigeration. Some previous attempt is also known, as for example by Carl Von Linde, who had designed a refrigerating machine working with CO2 for the Company F. Krupp of Essen, in Germany.
CO2: the Maritime Marvel
It is commonly believed that carbon dioxide was exclusively used as a refrigerant aboard ships. It is certainly true that, of the three sectors which drove the rapid expansion of mechanical refrigeration at the beginning of the twentieth century, that is ice manufacturing, beer brewing and meat transportation from Australia and Latin America to Great Britain, this last one mainly involved the general use of equipment working with CO2 as a refrigerant starting from 1890; before this date air-cycle machines were mainly employed. By 1910 J&E Hall had already installed 1800 refrigerating machines aboard ships.
But there are also numerous examples of use of CO2 refrigerating machines in different sectors. Examples are cooling of the ammunition magazine in warships, in breweries, in wine or liquor cellars, in slaughterhouses, in dairy industries, in artificial ice factories and also in all civil application where the safety issue was considered of prominent importance.
The number of CO2 compressor manufacturers rapidly increased in the first decade of the twentieth century, in particular in the Central and North European Countries. A German manual of 1915 lists 29 CO2 compressor manufacturers in North Europe, 24 of them in Germany, a number hard to believe nowadays.
The entrance into the market, starting from 1931, of the new synthesised halogenated refrigerants marked the rapid and inexorable decline in the use of carbon dioxide as a refrigerant, which though withstood in the field for long.
In 1946, 88 percent of the British Fleet still used CO2 as the refrigerant, and in 1963, 22 percent of the ships recorded in the French Register of Shipping was equipped with CO2 refrigerating machines.
The reasons for this rapid decline lay certainly in the low energy efficiency of this equipment, and in the drastic reduction in refrigerating power when ambient temperature increases (problem soon evidenced in ships crossing the warm equatorial seas). But certainly also in the failure of CO2 compressor manufacturers to conform their production to modern technological developments (more compact and faster equipment, and therefore less costly).
Studies have shown that carbon dioxide is very abundant in the environment, waste of many technological processes; its cost is thus extremely low, easily available anywhere, and its recovery from dismissed equipment or in maintenance is not required (Lorentzen 1994):
“As being a natural fluid, its harmlessness to the biosphere is demonstrated, it is a product that displays no special local safety problem, as it is non-flammable and non-toxic. Gas heavier than air, it can accumulate in the lower part of a nonventilated ambient, especially in a basement, causing suffocation for lack of oxygen.
Holds of ships may be prone to this kind of events; it is an inert product, compatible with all common materials encountered in a refrigerating circuit, both metals and plastics or elastomers;
FURTHER READING:
Refer also to the following relevant web resources:
Air Conditioning Heating and Refrigeration (ACHR) News: CO2 as Refrigerant: The Transcritical Cycle
Food Manufacturing: Why CO2 is a Viable Refrigerant Alternative
Building Green: A Heat Pump Using Carbon Dioxide as the Refrigerant
Emerson Climate Conversation: CO2 as a Refrigerant (Includes a series of 13 posts)
Danfoss: Natural Refrigerants – CO2
Environmental Leader: Automakers Develop CO2-Based Air Conditioning (including Volkswagen, Daimler, Audi, BMW and Porsche)
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