Sound waves could someday quiet down your refrigerator [Technology]

Refrigerators are the source of much joy on the planet, and the fridge is made possible by continually-cycled, selectively-pressurized gas. But someday, sound waves may replace this technique for your fridge.

In your modern refrigerator, the gas (called a refrigerant) starts its journey outside the fridge, where it really is pumped through a sequence of coils which compress it. The compression heats it up, and it bleeds heat into the air around it. After it has shaken off enough heat, and remains under quite a lot of pressure, it condenses into a liquid.

The liquid refrigerant is then undergone a valve which allows the liquid, slightly at a time, to go from a truly high pressure chamber to a really low pressure one. The refrigerant goes from liquid to gas, and the gas expands rapidly.

When liquid evaporates, it cools. When gas expands, it cools. The refrigerant has moved from liquid to gas and the gas has expanded quickly. The end result is quite a lot of extremely cold gas, that is pushed up into metal coils within the fridge. This cold gas rushing in the course of the coils cools the inside the fridge. When the gas is pushed up throughout the fridge and back out, it’s compressed once more, and cycle starts over.

Current compressors are mechanical. It’s going to not always be that way. Thermoacoustic compressors could be on the style. In place of mechanics, these will use loud sound waves at resonant frequencies to generate compression of the gas. Not only will this save power, but many tests had been done using air, in preference to refrigerants. Considering many refrigerants are ecologically damaging, like chlorofluorocarbons, or dangerous for humans to inhale, like ammonia, sound waves is also a superb option.

[Via Light-Science , Wired , and How Things Work ]

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This post is tagged: refrigerator, someday, Sound, Technology, waves