A novel low carbon superconductive food display cabinet

Completed

Energy Efficiency(Residential and commercial)

Basic and strategic applied research
Applied Research and Development

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY

Not Cross-cutting

Professor GG Maidment
Faculty of Engineering, Science and the Built Environment
London South Bank University

3

Carbon Trust

01 March 2004

30 September 2005

19 months

£36,934

London

Professor GG Maidment, Faculty of Engineering, Science and the Built Environment, London South Bank University

The purpose of this project is to investigate a novel superconductive cooling technique for food systems. This study will pioneer the research of a generic concept offering improved temperature control throughout the food supply chain leading to large energy savings and much improved food safety.

The supermarket is a large user of energy, consuming as much as 15,000GWh of the UK's total consumption. Of this, 50% is consumed by refrigeration equipment which provides cooling for retail cabinets used for chilled and frozen foods. The purpose of these cabinets is both to display the food products attractively and to maintain food at temperatures below that required by food hygiene legislation. These cabinets use convective cooling to cool the food but, owing to the low air velocities, heat transfer rates are very low. Consequently, the air stream entering the cabinets needs to be cooled to low temperatures to compensate for the poor convective heat transfer. Achieving low air temperatures results in a large energy penalty, through increased cabinet loads, lower refrigeration system efficiency and the necessity for energy-intensive defrost systems. A creative and novel concept able to provide significantly higher food-cooling rates is the subject of this proposal. The concept uses superconductive cooling in addition to convective cooling to significantly increase heat transfer rates to the food enabling the cabinet to operate more efficiently and therefore at much higher temperatures. Preliminary research carried out by the applicants has shown that with this system lower food temperatures can be achieved with significantly higher air supply temperatures. A 4(K increase in air supply temperature is possible, which will give energy savings and CO2 reductions of approximately 50% compared with traditional food display methods. Also, lower food temperatures will improve food quality and safety. The superconductive food cooling technique is potentially an attractive commercial product, which could be supplied to new and retrofit cabinets. It is estimate that potential CO2 savings of 1.9 million tonnes per year could be achieved following this research and proof of concept study

01/01/07