Sunday 8 August 2010

Einstein’s Fridge

Recently read about a patent which Einstein filed in 1930 for a refrigerator which have no moving parts (so would last forever!) and required no electricity, only a heat source to power it.

It turns out this, this is what kerosene gas fridges are based on. Here is a good diagram that explains of how it works:
The interesting bit is where it adds hydrogen gas to the evaporator, which reduces the partial pressure of the ammonia gas which drives the evaporation of the remaining liquid ammonia.
Now obviously in our case we would use concentrated solar power as the heat source.
Using this system we could have continuous cooling for as long as the sun shines. For air conditioning thats fine but for cold storage, ideally you want to keep a constant temperature day and night so we could heat a thermal storage fluid (e.g molten salts) which could then be used as a heat source which would stay hot and therefore run the sytem 24hours a day! ... but this would require a pump to control the flow of the molten salt ... unless there’s another way...

Theres a PHd student who looked into this (see here ) just in 2008 . Will try to find out more from him.





2 comments:

  1. Use a sterling engine with a geothermal exchange to run the pumps from the heat source...

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  2. Is this the concept used on "Geronimo" The giant ice machine Harrison Ford built in the movie Mosquito Coast?

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