ENERGY EFFICIENCY
Cooling More with Less

Ed Vineyard checks the instrumentation in a highly efficient refrigerator model. Vineyard's team redesigned a refrigerator to reduce its energy use by 50%.

In the past three decades, ORNL has spearheaded the development of refrigeration systems that use less energy and pose less of a threat to the environment. The motivations have been the rise in energy prices since the 1970s because of unstable supplies of imported oil for fuel; the recent goal to reduce the need for coal-fired power plants and thus cut climate-altering carbon dioxide emissions; and the mandate to replace conventional refrigerants containing chlorofluorocarbons, to preserve the stratospheric ozone layer protecting us.

ORNL engineers have worked with major appliance manufacturers to improve the energy efficiency of refrigeration equipment and to investigate ozone-friendly alternative refrigerants. In collaboration with Arthur D. Little, Amana, Maytag, General Electric, Sub-Zero, Sanyo, DuPont, Frigidaire, and Whirlpool, ORNL researchers designed more-efficient refrigerators, compressors, and supermarket refrigeration systems. In the early 1980s, they built a computer model still used to design energy-efficient refrigerators. In the late 1990s, relying on computer analyses and input from appliance manufacturers, researchers led by Ed Vineyard altered the design of the refrigerator-freezer to reduce energy use by 50% to one kilowatt-hour per day.

A team at ORNL's Buildings Technology Center worked with DuPont to identify ozone-safe refrigerant blends and suggest system changes that allow new blends to increase energy efficiency. Partly as a result of ORNL's refrigerant tests and computer modeling, chlorine-free HFC-134a is commonly used in new refrigeration systems.

ORNL researchers led by Van Baxter influenced the design of supermarket refrigeration units, which now have improved microprocessors and their own compressors (rather than potentially leaky lines to a central compressor). These changes cut supermarket energy consumption by 30% and annual electricity costs by $4 billion.

ORNL's refrigeration work was recently cited by the Department of Energy as the second-highest-rated accomplishment among 100 DOE-developed technologies that have most improved consumers' lives.

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