DETforDRF 2.0 · Design and Expansion Turbine for Domestic Refrigerators and Freezers

This proposal for a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship for Career Development is meant for the training of a research fellow from Spain in the laboratories of BSH Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH, (BSH), Germany, the largest home appliance manufacturer in Europe. The goal of the DETforDRF 2.0 project is to explore the required expansion mechanism in a cooling circuit of a household refrigerator in order to increase the efficiency of the system and the utilization of the released energy in the expansion process. The proposed research-training activities will be done in an industrial context and will cover the science, technology and business value chain. The training will start by applying relevant fundamental principles of the physics of fluid dynamics, followed by the design and construction of a turbine, based on an innovative concept to decrease the energy consumption of refrigerators and freezers, and ends with a market study to explore the possibility of mass production of the newly developed concept. The innovative concept relies on the expansion mechanism that is realized through the capillary tubes and permits the transformation of the energy of the system that will be lost otherwise, to a useful energy that will be used to increase the heat transfer coefficient in the cooling circuit. The project is focused on refrigerators, but the concept could be generalized to other applications, such as air-conditioners, and would generate insights on the recuperation of wasted energy for applications in other domains.