Operating costs and energy consumption are important design criteria for industrial refrigeration systems - improving the efficiency of refrigeration plants and reducing energy consumption translates into direct profits for the plant.
With an efficiency of 75 - 85%, energy savings of up to 26% (depending on the ambient temperature), refrigeration circuits operate in subcritical and transcritical cooling systems on CO 2 - according to the Shecco international analytical agency, the number of such installations in Europe exceeded 29 thousand units.
Industrial refrigeration using an advantageous refrigerant
Benefits from saving energy and materials ( industrial refrigerators on CO 2 compacts, completed with pipelines of small diameter) when using carbon dioxide as a refrigerant (designation R744) is supplemented with:
- environmental safety (ODP = 0, GWP = 1);
- fire and explosion safety (as opposed to, for example, toxic and flammable ammonia);
- chemical stability (inert to materials);
- the possibility of heat recovery.
Carbon dioxide is cheap and affordable, has favorable thermodynamic and physical properties for temperatures down to -50 ° C - its refrigeration capacity in terms of volumetric flow rate is 5 - 7 times higher than that of ammonia.
The disadvantages of using carbon dioxide are relatively large primary capital costs due to the need to maintain high operating pressures up to 10 MPa and a low critical temperature of 31.05 ° C.
The disadvantages are compensated by a reduction in the payback period of projects (in practice, large-scale solutions from 600 kW pay off within 3 - 5 years), significant efficiency due to a low compression ratio, as well as the design of refrigeration systems with cascade circuits of "subcritical" operation, in which for maintaining the condensation temperature within the range of 0 - 10 ° C, a pressure of 2.5 - 3.5 MPa is sufficient.
Refrigeration unit maintenance schedule
The second factor in obtaining additional profit is the uninterrupted operation of equipment, including refrigeration. It is possible to reduce the costs of the enterprise by increasing the periods between repairing industrial refrigeration equipment by adhering to the rules operation, taking timely measures to maintain the units - the regulations are prescribed in the technical documentation of the machines (instructions, passports), taken into account when compiling repair logs.
