A six chamber medium to high refrigeration system for laboratory purposes

Abstract

Food and water fuel and sustain life on earth. Since ancient time, their sourcing and preservation have been very important issues to humanity. In modern times, experimentation is a major step in analyzing how cold storage problems in the Medical and Food Science Technology fields can be addressed. For investigating spoilage of new products and/or growth of pathogens in such cases, it is necessary to do experiments at different low temperatures for prolonged periods and check the effects. While this can be undertaken in a conventional two chambers fridge, it takes a long time to investigate a whole range of feasible storage temperatures. This paper describes work intended to triple the samples in such investigations, and therefore, significantly reduce their time. Six well insulated chambers were constructed from plastic and wood and set at different temperatures. An ordinary deep freezer was used as the main heat sink for the chambers. Experiments were done with different fruits at settings between 0 and 15°C over a period of 8 months. It was finally established that a properly designed six chamber system can successfully be added to an ordinary freezer to provide different medium to high refrigeration temperatures without use of a multi-pressure refrigeration cycle.