The refrigeration cycle is a system of state transformations, but it is cyclical: the transformations of the product and of the cold delivery system are straighter, perhaps also vertical and irruent, given the speed impressed to the trends that are crossing it in the latter period. However, the regulatory context and the technical and applicative priorities are changing instead of technology.
Let us start from a preliminary assumption: cold is generated by the heat absorption, an action carried out by a refrigerating fluid that removes calories from an environment and transports them to another where it releases them. This assumption is useful to state that the refrigerating fluid is the heart of the mechanism and then the first reflection must be dedicated to this element. Why? Because for more than thirty years now the evolution of refrigerants is the focus of the legislative world’ s spotlights, owing to the environmental impact determined by patented synthetic fluorinated fluids, first CFC, then HCFC and today HFC and HFO. An impact that first was catalogued as a contribution to the ozone hole enlargement, to the extent of creating a category of gases, ozone-harmful, which have been banned and today it focuses on the equivalent carbon dioxide tons that the dispersion of these gases into the atmosphere determines.
New rules of the game
Therefore, for the second time in the lapse of ten years we are dealing with a narrowing of the meshes, in the direction of a constraint to use less and less climate-impacting gases, which reduce the risk of causing damages in virtue of emissions: the approval by the European Parliament of a new Fgas Regulation that replaces 517/2014 is expected by the 2024-spring and difficulties in the chain can be already envisaged, stemming from the further tightening that the phase out of gas currently used will impose.
Besides, at this point the question spontaneously arises: how can we replace them? If on one hand the chemical industry is producing less impacting solutions, with the Global Warming Potential (editor’s note: the index that defines the heating level in equivalent CO2 tons of refrigerating gases), it is also true that gases such as isobutane are making a comeback in the refrigeration industry field, they are certainly less impacting but they imply other difficulties.
It is in fact fundamental, in a context like the one of household appliances, intended for the refrigeration, thinking of a use that certainly exerts no impacts but essentially performs the entrusted task in efficient and safe modality, two essential factors for almost obvious reasons, but which despite their obviousness it is still appropriate to put under the magnifying glass because today these reasons are assuming a new meaning.
Efficiency before or after the environment?
Let us start from efficiency: the cooling contribution, that is to say the heat absorption capacity by cooling fluids is a central variable of the work carried out by the equipment, no matter whether its name is refrigerator, freezer, blast chiller or something else. To achieve cold in an environment, it is necessary to have fluids that work efficiently: well, not all state-of-the-art fluids, less climate-impacting, are up to the performances of old R22, R404A and so on.
This implies a potential increment of electric consumptions to remove the same quantity of heat from a cell, from a refrigerated cabinet or a display counter in a restaurant, from a domestic refrigerator. Moreover, in an era of strong increments of the primary electric energy cost, the impossibility of obtaining secondary thermal energy with low consumptions is burdensome and then unpleasant for the market.
Let us never forget an issue that makes the difference in this field: the refrigerator is the only household appliance that works H24: it is not the oven, or the dishwasher, and neither the washing machine, it is the appliance that must maintain ideal and appropriate conservation temperatures for food and can never stop its action, therefore we cannot “use it less” or invite users to switch it on in hours when the energy withdrawal from the grid can eventually cost less.
The safety variable
Certainly, there are “efficient” gases, but they are often gases that belong to technical risk classifications that must generate attention to the second aspect we have just mentioned, safety: a flammable, or slightly flammable gas used in domestic environment, even if introduced into a low-charge circuit, needs more manufacturing and maintenance care than the one required by A1 gases, that is to say non-flammable.
Therefore, what is the issue deserving attention? Certainly, in production stages, a duly insight should be performed for the certification of all components in the fireproof classification matter, with special attention to the choice of materials and of assembling technologies, starting from the insulation component, where we have “conflict of interest” among foams’ materials and the flammability of refrigerating gases, but also the need of more efficient insulations with unchanged thickness, to avoid decreasing useful conservation volumes.
This hint at the theme of insulation substances once more boosts the research and development field, where we once more deal with the increasingly binding limits and constraints set by a legislation that involves the commitment of ECHA (European Chemicals Agency) and of the European Commission in the more and more accurate definition of REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals), an action that engages in a really accurate selection of raw materials, in virtue of their potential repercussions on human health and environment.
Pandemic and global system crisis
However, if all this was not sufficient, an unexpected variable in the globalization course is coming, or better, has already arrived, and for a long time now: the pandemic and the consequent crisis of the system of intercontinental exchanges, concerning both logistics and prices, has given birth to a situation of serious organizational difficulty of the market on several fronts.
Essentially, costs: manufacturing costs, provisioning costs deriving from the increment of freight prices, incremented costs caused by the need of components’ stocks, to face always just in time production and assembling, however increasingly linked with the availability of all elements to obtain the finished product. All factors that had had their own stability in the period preceding Covid and that today have turned into variables no longer under control, with delicate consequences in margins.
Logistics has become a maddened variable: those who do not have the financial strength to shorten the supply chain or to stock up run the risk of components and spare parts, and if we may think of finding alternatives for washing, being without a refrigerator at home or in a restaurant is almost impossible or dramatic, so a breakdown turns into a lottery: if in the past customers could complain about the planned obsolescence or get angry about the costs of spare parts, today a distributor’s answer can even be “I do not know how to help you” and this is a real problem, especially where the equipment is professional and then linked with manufacturing activities and cycles.
Useless saying that it is a reflection of at least general complexity, which involves industrial and infrastructural policies at macro level, but it is also one of the determinants of the survival of companies that, due to their quality, were vocationally oriented to the flow of engineering–industrialization–component purchase–assembly–service and had no financial resources for integrated property manufacturing cycles.
A new balance worth implementing
It is hard to say what the finishing line of this course is, but currently it is very difficult to assess in the long period the burden that this destabilization of a global market model has created. Certainly, it cannot remain in charge to the producer, because he would find himself chocked by growing costs: it is true that turning it all on the customer is just as impossible because it risks of triggering slowdown processes of a replacement market that the environmental protection regulation can boost, but not so mandatorily if not in presence of incentives.
It is as true that the regulation should learn to agree with itself, because the pressing for a system of more efficient appliances, and at the same time the elimination of climate-impacting materials from the market often clash, with results that arouse operators’ perplexity and create conflicts among those who would like everything immediately, like environmentalist lobbies, and those who would prefer slow transitions such as industrial lobbies. However, refrigeration – we reaffirm it – is nowadays an irremissible service in our model of life and of consumptions, therefore we have to conceive a transition model that is compatible with industrial costs and economy laws, otherwise the ambition of a zero-impact refrigeration runs the risk of becoming a chimera.
