IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jsusta/v4y2012i11p2838-2851d20987.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Environmental Profiles of Stirling-Cooled and Cascade-Cooled Ultra-Low Temperature Freezers

Author

Listed:
  • David M. Berchowitz

    (Global Cooling Inc., 6000 Poston Rd. Athens 45701, OH, USA)

  • Yongrak Kwon

    (Global Cooling Inc., 6000 Poston Rd. Athens 45701, OH, USA)

Abstract

The environmental footprint of ultra-low temperature (ULT) freezers as used in bio-repositories, universities and other research organizations is investigated. These freezers, employing the cascade refrigeration system, use between 10 and 20 times the energy of an average household refrigerator/freezer. In addition, they often require high greenhouse gas potential (GWP) refrigerants. A new technology employing the Stirling cycle machine promises to reduce energy consumption of ULT freezers by 50% or more. The cascade and Stirling systems are compared for equivalent sized freezers in terms of embodied energy and equivalent CO 2 production from cradle to gate and use, including total equivalent warming impact (TEWI) estimations. End-of-life issues are discussed but not quantified. It is shown that Stirling technology is able to significantly reduce the environmental impact of ULT freezers.

Suggested Citation

  • David M. Berchowitz & Yongrak Kwon, 2012. "Environmental Profiles of Stirling-Cooled and Cascade-Cooled Ultra-Low Temperature Freezers," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 4(11), pages 1-14, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:4:y:2012:i:11:p:2838-2851:d:20987
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/4/11/2838/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/4/11/2838/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Cui, Yunhao & Qiao, Jianxin & Song, Bin & Wang, Xiaotao & Yang, Zhaohui & Li, Haibing & Dai, Wei, 2021. "Experimental study of a free piston Stirling cooler with wound wire mesh regenerator," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 234(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:4:y:2012:i:11:p:2838-2851:d:20987. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.