CO2 trans-critical in refrigerated warehouses? Yes, indeed! -G. Pisano-

         

Refrigerated warehouses are becoming more and more popular, providing the needed back-up support for fresh and frozen food home delivery.

                         

However, actual F-gas regulation is imposing severe hurdles in deploying HFCs for these applications, while end users are constantly looking for an alternative to ammonia based refrigeration system.

CO2 trans-critical units were never coming into the picture mainly due to the lack of large components, such as compressors: this made it impossible to cost-effectively apply CO2 trans-critical technology to such large duties systems.

However, with the usual strong focus on market requests, DORIN has once again shaped the future and recently developed and launched the largest CO2 trans-critical compressors range, with displacements up to 60 m3/h and 100 hp electric motor size.

This made it possible to deliver up to 1.5 MW capacity

in a single rack system, thus making it possible to cost-effectively introduce CO2 trans-critical technology into industrially sized systems, such as refrigerated warehouses.

As an example, it is worth to mention this existing implementation of large scale CO2 trans-critical systems.

In fact, recently one of the leading supermarket chains decided to install this technology in its largest distribution center: with an height up to  22m,an area of 29000 m2 is temperature controlled, deploying about 4 MW refrigeration capacity and using only 4 CO2 trans-critical racks to reach these stunning performances.

It is therefore clear that CO2 trans-critical technology is now fully capable to fulfill large system duties with the needed cost-effectiveness, providing an excellent alternative to HFCs and ammonia based refrigeration systems.