mailto:davylawyer1@gmail.comThe gas refrigerator is powered by propane gas (or natural gas) instead of electricity. Today they are used mainly in recreational vehicles and in locations where there is no electricity. But in the United States in the 1930's and 1940's and beyond, the Servel brand of gas refrigerator was often found in homes which also had electricity. They were claimed to be better than electric refrigeration since they were not only silent but had no moving parts to wear out. They lasted roughly 60 years while it's claimed that the gas refrigerators made today only last about 15 years. The 10 year unconditional guarantee read in part: "We believe that eventually the Gas refrigerator will replace all other kinds because it is basically better --the most modern form of refrigeration yet discovered."
But there are some negative aspects. The large number of stages in its operating cycle make the gas refrigerator more costly and heavier and takes away interior volume that could otherwise be used to store more food. Since it burns gas it needs ventilation.
The propane gas is burned to produce heat which boils a mixture of water and ammonia, releasing ammonia vapor and "pumping" fluids thru the system. To understand how it works, it helps to understand a little about "physical chemistry" such as "latent heat of vaporization" and "partial pressures" in a mixture of gases. But even if you don't know what these mean, you may learn what they mean by reading this article.
Both the gas and electric refrigerator operate on the same principle of creating cold by evaporating a refrigerant, which makes cold by absorbing heat (known as "latent heat of vaporization"). We all know that evaporating water (like from sweat) causes cooling and so does evaporating a liquid refrigerant such as ammonia in a gas refrigerator.
The cycle in an electric refrigerator is much simpler than a gas one: An electric pump compresses the refrigerant gas and liquefies it. The refrigerant liquid, under high pressure, sprays into a region of low pressure and thereby evaporates (turns into a gas) creating cold (the refrigerant absorbs heat due to its change of state from a liquid to a gas). Absorbing heat from the contents of the fridge makes the food cold. Then the gas is compressed again so as to both turn it into a liquid and increase its pressure. Then it's evaporated again, etc, etc. During compression the gaseous refrigerant becomes very hot and the heat is transferred to the room air via cooling fins on the outlet side of the compressor (like in an automobile radiator). As the hot gas refrigerant cools just after compression it becomes liquid again.
Both the gas and electric refrigerator cycle a refrigerant, which for a gas fridge is ammonia. The cold is produced in both refrigerators by the same physical principle: the evaporation of a refrigerant. But the gas fridge has 3 fluids in the cycle instead of just one refrigerant, although only ammonia makes it thru the complete cycle. The other two fluids found in parts of the cycle are: 1. water (a small portion of water inadvertently becomes steam) 2.hydrogen gas. These two substances only make it thru part of the complete cycle and then feed back to an earlier part of the cycle to be reused. There are no chemical /reactions, just changes of state between a liquid and gas (except that the hydrogen always remains a gas). There are no moving parts. All the state changes happen inside pipes. While an electric fridge has a big drop in pressure to get the refrigerant to evaporate, the gas fridge has the same high pressure in all parts of the cycle and thus doesn't need much of a pump to circulate the fluids. Note that both liquids and gases are called "fluids".
The above brief explanation leads to questions that must be explained. And the answers will lead to further questions etc. Some initial questions are: How does ammonia evaporate without a change in pressure? How do fluids circulate without a powered pump? What is the water and hydrogen used for? Read on to find the answers and much more.
The first question that comes to mind is: How can ammonia liquid evaporate unless there is a decrease in pressure? This is where the hydrogen gas comes into play since the ammonia liquid is evaporated into an atmosphere of hydrogen (unavoidably mixed in with some ammonia gas which has just evaporated). The total pressure, which remains constant, is just the sum of the pressures of the hydrogen gas and the ammonia gas and these pressures are known as "partial pressures" which when added up give the total pressure. So the partial pressure of the ammonia gas is less than the total pressure of the ammonia liquid and this lower pressure results in the liquid ammonia evaporating. If it were not for the hydrogen, the ammonia would not evaporate since the pressure in the system would prevent it unless the temperature was high.
It's similar to cooling by water evaporation into air. When water is sprayed into a moving stream of air the tiny water droplets evaporate because they are at atmospheric pressure while the partial pressure of the water vapor in the atmosphere surrounding these droplets is lower since the water vapor is mixed with and air and thus has a lower partial pressure. Of course, since air is primarily a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen gases, there are three gases in this mixture surrounding a droplet (including water vapor).
In the gas refrigerator, the pipe feeding the liquid ammonia to be evaporated is small in diameter compared to the larger pipe feeding the hydrogen gas. This is something like spraying water into an air stream as described above but in the frige, liquid ammonia is "sprayed" into a flowing stream of hydrogen gas. But since the pressure in the gas fridge is much higher than atmospheric, the pressure difference between the ammonia droplets and ammonia vapor (partial) is much greater, and thus the evaporation of liquid ammonia proceeds at a much faster rate than for water evaporating in air. This all happens inside a cold pipe which zig-zags back and forth inside the freezer compartment and eventually enters the main refrigerator compartment where fins attached to the cold pipe help to cool the food stored there.
Now we have a cold mixture of ammonia and hydrogen gases and we need to somehow separate the ammonia from the hydrogen and liquefy the ammonia so as to repeat the process. To do this we use water. The ammonia gas dissolves in water leaving the hydrogen since hydrogen doesn't dissolve in water. Then we remove the ammonia from the ammonia-water solution by boiling the water solution using heat from a gas flame. Then the resulting hot ammonia gas is liquefied by cooling it back down to somewhat above room temperature. Now the liquid ammonia is again evaporated via spaying it into hydrogen and thus the cycle repeats itself.
Now to explain this process in more detail: As we have seen, cooling takes place by evaporating liquid ammonia in an atmosphere of hydrogen gas resulting in a mixture of ammonia gas and hydrogen. To reuse the ammonia and hydrogen we need separate them and eventually liquefy the ammonia. To separate out the hydrogen, an "absorption unit" consisting of a fin-cooled (by room air) pipe is used where liquid water flows down a sloped pipe to absorb the ammonia from the mixture of ammonia-hydrogen gas flowing up the same pipe. It's a bi-directional flow of fluids: a liquid water solution flows downhill and two mixed gases flow uphill (all inside the same pipe). When the gas reaches the top, it's nearly pure hydrogen because the flowing water has absorbed (or "washed out") almost all the ammonia gas. Thus this fridge is sometimes called an "absorption" refrigerator" (the water absorbs the ammonia gas). The resulting recycled hydrogen gas is now ready to again meet more recycled liquid ammonia so as to evaporate it to create cold. We have so far recycled the hydrogen but not the ammonia because the ammonia is now mixed (dissolved)with water .
The (washed out) ammonia, now dissolved in water, must be recovered and separated from the water. So the ammonia solution is boiled (inside a pipe) by a gas flame. Mostly ammonia is evaporated leaving water (which is reused as explained above to wash out more ammonia from the ammonia-hydrogen gas). But since some water has inadvertently been boiled off with the ammonia, it's recovered in a "reflux condenser and rectifier" where water droplets condense on the interior surface of a finned pipe (the fins help cool the pipe a bit by the air in the room) and water from the condensate (in droplets) flows downward while the nearly pure ammonia gas flows up the pipe (again bi-directional flow). Thus the ammonia gas is "cleaned" of water-vapor. Then the pure ammonia gas is further cooled (by passing it thru more finned pipes) to a little above room temperature resulting in liquid ammonia. There's a U trap here (like under the kitchen sink) to make sure no gases get into the liquefied ammonia.
Now the ammonia liquid (after the trap) flows into a much larger diameter pipe where hydrogen gas is flowing. The vapor pressure of the ammonia liquid (at the liquid-gas surfaces) is high enough so that it evaporates rapidly in the hydrogen gas atmosphere resulting in freezing cold. It evaporates rather quickly since the partial ammonia gas pressure above the surfaces of the ammonia liquid droplets is low due to the presence of the hydrogen. After exiting the cold pipe inside the frige, water is used to wash out the ammonia from ammonia-hydrogen gas mixture as has been previously described.
The summary of the cycle shown below can only be fully understood if you understand the above paragraphs. All steps itemized below happen inside pipes. The name of the part of the fridge that does each step is shown in parentheses.
Besides exchanging heat with the air and providing cold, there are "internal" heat exchangers to increase efficiency. The whole system is enclosed and at high pressure (everywhere the same pressure). Some "pipes" are often quite long due to many U bends in the pipe which thus doubles back on itself, thereby increasing the pipe length. This is a type of "zig-zag". For a pipe, which has a liquid which must flow downhill for a long distance, the pipe may be sloped with sharp bends (zig-zags) something like a trail going down a mountain with sharp switchbacks. With high pressure everywhere in the system the density of the gases (hydrogen and ammonia) is quite high, resulting in more cooling being done.
Since ammonia at atmospheric pressure is a vapor, why doesn't it require compression to liquefy it? It's because the high pressure in the gas fridge pipes is high enough to always liquefy pure ammonia vapor provided it's not significantly hotter than room temperature. In the gas frige, ammonia will be a liquid unless it's vaporized either by mixing it with hydrogen (reduces its partial pressure) or if it's hot (after boiling off the ammonia dissolved in water).
Both a gas and electric refrigerator cool by the same principle of liquid evaporation (latent heat of evaporation). But in the electric frige, the evaporation happens due to a pressure drop created by an electric-motor driven pump. In a gas frige, this "pressure drop" is created by reducing ammonia vapor partial pressure by injecting liquid ammonia into hydrogen gas.
While the electric pump uses energy, in the electric fridge it might seem that the introduction of hydrogen (in the gas frige.) achieves the pressure drop without using any energy since there is no mechanical pump and total pressure remains constant. But actually, energy is required to recycle the hydrogen and ammonia gas which uses water to separate them by washing out the ammonia with water and then recovering the ammonia from the water by boiling it off. Thus the heating of the water solution to boil off the ammonia does require energy provided by a blue gas flame.