A novel concept of rapid cooling method of refrigeration system

This paper describes a novel cooling method of enhancing refrigeration capacity during short time (order of 1 min) by storing low-temperature liquid refrigerant. This method actively controls the refrigerant mass flow rate for the evaporator. The compressor of the refrigerator, therefore, does not have to be oversized to cope with intermittent large cooling load of the system. During a short period of time, a higher cooling capacity than that of the steady operation is achieved by the increased mass flow rate of liquid refrigerant. An experimental apparatus was designed and fabricated to validate the proposed cooling methodology. Two reservoirs as temporary sequential storages of the refrigerant were set up before and after the evaporator. Several on/off solenoid valves were installed to control the refrigerant flow. From the experimental results, we confirmed a successful operation of rapid cooling process as designed. This rapid cooling methodology shall be useful for temporarily enhancing the refrigeration capacity in other low-capacity refrigeration systems. The practical system must optimize the design of refrigerant reservoirs to reduce the whole system size.