Alternative Technologies for Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Applications

摘要

The report gives results of an assessment of refrigeration technologies that arealternatives to vapor compression refrigeration for use in five application categories: domestic air conditioning, commercial air conditioning, mobile air conditioning, domestic refrigeration, and commercial refrigeration. A fundamental criterion for the selection of the alternative refrigeration technologies to be assessed was that they be environmentally safe. The study was conducted in three phases: a survey of U.S. patents, system modeling, and a technology assessment. Each refrigeration application was defined by a set of thermal source and sink temperatures. The U.S. patent survey was conducted from 1918 to the present. A method was developed for classifying refrigeration technologies found during the survey.