A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit a good friend who has been in the refrigeration industry for many years. I was unexpectedly jealous looking at the old refrigeration book collection he had proudly displayed in his home office. The collection had textbooks dating back to the 19th century and what looked like almost ever ASRE and ASHRAE handbook ever published. This is for sure an exaggeration, but regardless, the collection was quite impressive.
I spent several minutes looking through some of the really early industry textbooks and some other literature, and it occurred to me that we should really appreciate how much change is happening right now.
It’s sometimes hard to see when you are in the middle of it, but I don’t think that in its entire history, the refrigeration industry has ever had to handle so many things changing and developing as it does right now. After decades of relatively stable technology with a somewhat typical technological progression from the 1950s to the 2000s, the industry has had to change and adapt quickly.
Synthetic refrigerants
As you changed oil on yet another CFC to HFC conversion in the late 1990s, you could probably be forgiven for thinking that most change is behind you. Sure, we still had some R12 units out there and there were some pesky interim blend refrigerants (like MP-39) left to deal with, and the industry has yet to deal with the R22 phase out, but for commercial refrigeration systems at least, R507 and R404a were established as the refrigerant of choice for new installations.
These “new” HFCs worked well and may have lulled some people into thinking they would become the new normal. For those people, the announcement from Chemours a couple of weeks ago that they were immediately stopping all sales of R404A, and R507 in the U.S. would have been a bit of a shock.
The transition to lower GWP refrigerant continues and will continue for quite a long time. We talk in this column regularly about the introduction of A2L refrigerants and all the associated code changes our industry is dealing with. Having been involved in code development extensively over the last two decades, I can say that the pace of change has never been higher than it is now. It is almost impossible to keep up unless it is your full-time job, and it is becoming difficult for designers to understand how to design new systems that are not in danger of being non-compliant due to future changes.
Even as we transition to A2Ls in several applications, there is some indication that many of them will not be here to stay either. First, there is the increasing drive to reduce GWP even further (for example, R32 has a GWP of 675, not zero).
Second, many of the new refrigerants contain perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are known colloquially as “forever chemicals.” There has already been proposed regulation in Europe to ban many of the new refrigerants because of this. The debate about the actual dangers of PFASs is well beyond my expertise and outside of the scope of this column but suffice it to say that there is still a lot of uncertainty in the future application of synthetic refrigerants.
Heat pumps
Perhaps one of the most fascinating changes happening to the refrigeration industry is the increasing application of heat pumps. Applications that include operating at temperatures well in excess of normal – there are now heat pumps that can create steam!
In addition, there are applications that include extracting heat from source temperatures well below normal. My house, for example, has an air-source heat pump that functions and provides adequate heat all the way down to outdoor temperatures of -30 C. Heat pumps are now used in clothes dryers, water heaters, and vehicles. Their role in electrification and the decarbonization of our energy consumption is basically impossible to ignore; this can be seen by the ever-increasing trend of online heat pump searches shown in Figure 1.
Heat pumps are definitely not new, but the extended and new applications are driving some amazing technology. Multi-stage scroll compressors, complex advanced refrigeration cycles, and non-frosting coils, just to name a few.
Carbon dioxide
Just like heat pumps, carbon dioxide (CO2) refrigeration is not a new technology. In fact, there was reference to CO2 in some of the old books I mentioned in the introduction. That said, the technology was not widely used for a century. Now, we are fully in the middle of a CO2 renaissance.
In the early 2000s, CO2 started re-emerging in Europe as a potential for grocery store type applications. For several reasons, one of which was the need to switch R22 ice arenas to a different refrigeration in a regulatory environment not favourable to ammonia. Several manufacturers emerged building CO2 refrigeration systems in Quebec. They were the first manufacturers in North America and even though today the original companies are either gone or have been purchased by larger international or U.S. organizations, Quebec remains central for CO2 expertise and manufacturing.
As we have discussed several times in the past, using CO2 as a refrigerant comes with a lot of challenges. The pressure is very high, they operate super-critical, and the systems are not very efficient at high ambient temperatures. The list of challenges is long. But, to the optimist, challenges equal opportunity, and over the last decade, the industry has developed components and technology to address a lot of the concerns.
When I did my B.Sc. capstone design project using refrigerant ejectors, I had absolutely no idea I would see that technology in real life. However, right now you can buy systems with ejectors being used to increase their efficiency (incidentally, and to be clear, this was not because of anything I did). Today, a significant portion of grocery stores and larger refrigeration systems in Canada are being installed using CO2 and if my day-to-day experience is any kind of a reliable indicator, the use of CO2 is going to continue to increase.
The industry’s big challenge
This all brings me to what I believe is the industry’s biggest challenge: people. It is the same challenge facing most industries and unfortunately, it is affecting the trades and technical industries to a much higher degree. Our ability to implement and service new technologies relies on smart people who have boots on the ground and are invested in the work we do.
Unfortunately, it seems we are not doing the best job we could figuring out how to get people in these positions and I can see that the post-covid work from home reality that exists for knowledge workers is continuing to put negative pressure on the recruitment of young people for physical work. The topic of recruitment and retention of Gen Z technicians is one that will take many forms over the next several years and perhaps I’ll give my two cents soon.
In any case, just remember that the ‘kids’ today are the technicians of the future, whether you like it or not and we need to figure out how to help them manage and succeed through all these changes.