Carl Linde and Refrigeration Process
Refrigeration processing was developed by Carl Von Linde. He developed his first compression refrigerating machines using methyl ether and studied the difficulties of working with this refrigerant. He established a methyl ether unit in 1874. He paved the way for great improvements in refrigerating machinery by demonstrating how thermodynamics efficiency could be calculated and increased.
He founded the Gessellschaft fur Linde’s Eismachinen in Wiesbaden to develop his refrigeration process on an industrial scale. By the time Linde left Wiesbaden in 1891 to resume his teaching and research, 1200 of his refrigeration machines had been installed.
At that time no body had succeeded in liquefying oxygen in other than very small quantities. Linde’s combined two known effects. One was to use a countercurrent heat exchanger arrangement.
The other effect Linde used was that of achieving refrigeration by expanding air. The work performed by such an expansion has to come out of the heat content of the gas, thereby cooking the gas. Such cooling could be produced by expanding air in a piston expansion engine.
Linde then found a simple valve which works exactly like the porous plug could be used. The valve employed was far more reliable than an engine at very low temperatures. So he designed a spiral heat exchanger consisting of a 100 meter long, 4 inch pipe with a 1.5 inch pipe inside it.
Linde’s inventions had immediate effects on industrial gas development. It is well known that the air liquefaction system developed by Carl Linde in 1895 was the first commercially successfully cryogenic system.
The works of Linde were highly appreciated by D. Mendeleew and N. Umov in Russia. Moscow University purchased the air liquefier made by Linde in 1898, thus the first cryogenic laboratory for education purposes was organized in Russia.
Carl Linde and Refrigeration Process
