About the authorMike Fisher has over 35 years of experience with refrigeration systems. This background includes; service, installation, equipment manufacturing, research and development, project management, consulting engineering, system design and packaged systems.
Energy conservation is a very interesting field. With the advances of technology we have items like solar panels for energy generation or water heating, battery technology for energy storage and new forms of lighting like LED lamps. A recent article on LED lamps caught my attention recently and I thought it would be a good example for comparison to ammonia refrigeration systems.
By now many of the States in the upper midwest have experienced very cold weather. As some have found, winter time presents some occasional challenges for starting or operating an ammonia refrigeration system.
I often see people interested in heat recovery asking questions about desuperheating. This mode of heat recovery is based on circulating a fluid such as water through a heat exchanger to aid in transferring heat from one location to another. One of the major issues with utilizing the superheat of the discharge gas from a refrigeration systems is; there is not a lot of available heat! The available superheat in the discharge gas from a compressor is only a small percentage of the the total available heat energy.
What impact does location have on your energy use? Obviously, if you are located in the South or Western part of the US your ambient temperatures (wet bulb or dry bulb, depending on condenser type) will be higher year round. This can limit your efforts to lower the discharge pressure.
If you are like a lot of other ammonia refrigeration system end-users you are trying to reduce your costs associated with energy usage. You may be exposed to a constant barrage of ideas or methods of what to do. One of the more popular concepts is: decrease the discharge pressure.
OK, now what? Someone said I need to do this and everyone talks about it, but what should I do?
