Refrigerators
by Chris Woodford. Last updated: May 18, 2011.
Now here's a cool idea: a metal box that helps your food last longer! Have you ever stopped to think how a refrigerator keeps cool, calm, and collected even in the blistering heat of summer? Food goes bad because bacteria breed inside it. But bacteria grow less quickly at lower temperatures, so the cooler you can keep food, the longer it will last. A refrigerator is a machine that keeps food cool with some very clever science. All the time your refrigerator is humming away, liquids are turning into gases, water is turning into ice, and your food is staying deliciously fresh. Let's take a closer look at how a refrigerator works!
Photo: A typical domestic refrigerator or "fridge" keeps food at a temperature roughly 0–5°C (32–41°F). Freezers work in a similar way, but cool down to a much lower temperature, typically −18 to −23°C (0 to −10°F).
How to move something you can't even see
Suppose your chore for today is to empty a stable full of rank smelling horse manure. Not the nicest of jobs, so you'll want to do it as quickly as possible. You won't be able to move it all at once, because there's too much of it. To get the job done fast, you need to move as much manure as you can in one go. The best thing to do is use a wheelbarrow. Pile the manure up into the barrow, wheel the barrow outside, and then empty the manure into a pile in the stable yard. With a few of these trips, you can shift the manure from inside the stable to outside.
Moving something you can see is easy. But now let's give you a harder chore. Your new task is to move the heat from the inside of a refrigerator to the outside to keep your food fresh. How can you move something you can't see? You can't use a wheelbarrow this time. Not only that, but you can't open the door to get at the heat inside, or you'll let the heat straight back in again. Your mission is to remove the heat, continually, without opening the door even once. Tricky problem, eh? But it's not impossible—at least not if you understand the science of gases.
How to move heat with a gas
Let's step sideways a moment and look at how gases behave. If you've ever pumped up the tires on a bicycle, you'll know that a bicycle pump soon gets quite warm. The reason is that gases heat up when you compress (squeeze) them. To make the tire support the weight of the bicycle and your body, you have to squeeze air into it at a high pressure. Pumping makes the air (and the pump it passes through) a little bit hotter. Why? As you squeeze the air, you have to work quite hard with the pump. The energy you use in pumping is converted into potential energy in the compressed gas: the gas in the tire is at a higher pressure and higher temperature than the cool air around you. If you squeeze a gas into half the volume, the heat energy its molecules contain fills only half as much space, so the temperature of the gas rises (it gets hotter).
Left: Gases get hotter when you compress into less volume them because you have to work to push their energetic molecules closer together.
What happens if you release a gas that's stored at high pressure? When you spray an aerosol air freshener, you've probably noticed that the spray is really cold—for exactly the opposite reason that a bicycle pump gets hot. When you release the gas, it is suddenly able to expand and occupy much more volume. The heat energy its molecules contain is now divided over a much bigger volume of space, so the temperature of the gas falls (it gets cooler).
Photo: Right: Liquids can turn to gases (and gases cool down) when you let them expand into more volume. That's why aerosol sprays feel so cold.
The heating and cooling cycle
By compressing gases, we make them hotter; by letting them expand, we make them cooler. How can we use this handy bit of physics to shift heat from the inside of a refrigerator? Suppose we made a pipe that was partly inside a refrigerator and partly outside it, and sealed so it was a continuous loop. And suppose we filled the pipe with a gas. Inside the refrigerator, we could make the pipe gradually get wider, so the gas would expand and cool as it flowed through it. Outside the refrigerator, we could have something like a bicycle pump to compress the gas and release its heat. If the gas flowed round and round the loop, expanding when it was inside the refrigerator and compressing when it was outside, it would constantly pick up heat from the inside and carry it to the outside like a heat conveyor belt.
And, surprise surprise, this is almost exactly how a refrigerator works. There are some extra details worth noting. Inside the refrigerator, the pipe expands through a nozzle known as an expansion valve. As the gas passes through it, it cools dramatically. This bit of science is sometimes known as the Joule-Thomson (or Joule-Kelvin) effect for the physicists who discovered it, James Prescott Joule (1818–1889) and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin, 1824–1907). You won't be surprised to discover that the compressor outside the refrigerator is not really a bicycle pump! It's actually an electrically powered pump. It's the thing that makes a refrigerator hum every so often. The compressor is attached to a grill-like device called a condenser (a kind of thin radiator behind the refrigerator) that expels the unwanted heat. Finally, the gas that circulates round the pipe is actually a specially designed chemical that alternates between being a cool liquid and a hot gas. This chemical is known as the coolant or refrigerant.
Photo: Left: Humid air inside your fridge contains water vapor. When the refrigerator cools, this water turns to ice. The coldest part of your fridge is the icebox at the top. That's because the expansion valve is placed right next to it.
Photo: Right: Here's the compressor from a typical refrigerator. Note the pipes carrying the coolant in one side and out the other. You can't see this unit unless you pull your appliance away from the wall, because it's tucked away around the back and at the bottom. See more photos of it in the box below.
