refrigeration, the process of removing heat from an enclosed space or from a substance for the purpose of lowering the temperature.
In the industrialized nations and affluent regions in the developing world, refrigeration is chiefly used to store foodstuffs at low temperatures, thus inhibiting the destructive action of bacteria, yeast, and mold. Many perishable products can be frozen, permitting them to be kept for months and even years with little loss in nutrition or flavour or change in appearance. Air-conditioning, the use of refrigeration for comfort cooling, has also become widespread in more developed nations.
Before mechanical refrigeration systems were introduced, ancient peoples, including the Greeks and Romans, cooled their food with ice transported from the mountains. Wealthy families made use of snow cellars, pits that were dug into the ground and insulated with wood and straw, to store the ice. In this manner, packed snow and ice could be preserved for months. Stored ice was the principal means of refrigeration until the beginning of the 20th century, and it is still used in some areas.
In India and Egypt evaporative cooling was employed. If a liquid is rapidly vaporized, it expands quickly. The rising molecules of vapour abruptly increase their kinetic energy. Much of this increase is drawn from the immediate surroundings of the vapour, which are therefore cooled. Thus, if water is placed in shallow trays during the cool tropical nights, its rapid evaporation can cause ice to form in the trays, even if the air does not fall below freezing temperatures. By controlling the conditions of evaporation, it is possible to form even large blocks of ice in this manner.
Cooling caused by the rapid expansion of gases is the primary means of refrigeration today. The technique of evaporative cooling, as described heretofore, has been known for centuries, but the fundamental methods of mechanical refrigeration were only discovered in the middle of the 19th century. The first known artificial refrigeration was demonstrated by William Cullen at the University of Glasgow in 1748. Cullen let ethyl ether boil into a partial vacuum; he did not, however, use the result to any practical purpose. In 1805 an American inventor, Oliver Evans, designed the first refrigeration machine that used vapour instead of liquid. Evans never constructed his machine, but one similar to it was built by an American physician, John Gorrie, in 1844.
Commercial refrigeration is believed to have been initiated by an American businessman, Alexander C. Twinning, in 1856. Shortly afterward, an Australian, James Harrison, examined the refrigerators used by Gorrie and Twinning and introduced vapour-compression refrigeration to the brewing and meat-packing industries. A somewhat more complex system was developed by Ferdinand Carré of France in 1859. Unlike earlier vapour-compression machines, which used air as a coolant, Carré’s equipment contained rapidly expanding ammonia. (Ammonia liquefies at a much lower temperature than water and is thus able to absorb more heat.) Carré’s refrigerators were widely used, and vapour-compression refrigeration became, and still is, the most widely used method of cooling.
In spite of the successful use of ammonia, that substance had a severe disadvantage: if it leaked, it was unpleasant as well as toxic. Refrigeration engineers searched for acceptable substitutes until the 1920s, when a number of synthetic refrigerants were developed. The best known of these substances was patented under the brand name of Freon. Chemically, Freon was created by the substitution of two chlorine and two fluorine atoms for the four hydrogen atoms in methane (CH4); the result, dichlorofluoromethane (CCl2F2), is odourless and is toxic only in extremely large doses.
The basic components of a modern vapour-compression refrigeration system are a compressor; a condenser; an expansion device, which can be a valve, a capillary tube, an engine, or a turbine; and an evaporator. The gas coolant is first compressed, usually by a piston, and then pushed through a tube into the condenser. In the condenser, the winding tube containing the vapour is passed through either circulating air or a bath of water, which removes some of the heat energy of the compressed gas. The cooled vapour is passed through an expansion valve to an area of much lower pressure; as the vapour expands, it draws the energy of its expansion from its surroundings or the medium in contact with it. Evaporators may directly cool a space by letting the vapour come into contact with the area to be chilled, or they may act indirectly—i.e., by cooling a secondary medium such as water. In most domestic refrigerators, the coil containing the evaporator directly contacts the air in the food compartment. At the end of the process, the hot gas is drawn toward the compressor.
In the 1960s certain characteristics of semiconductors began to be utilized for commercial refrigeration. Chief among these was the Peltier effect, named after the French chemist Jean Peltier, who observed in 1834 that electric currents passing through the junction of two different metals sometimes caused the junction to cool. When the junction is made from semiconductors such as bismuth telluride, the Peltier effect is of magnitude sufficient to permit its commercial use.