At 02:55 PM 6/28/2015, Jim Felder wrote:
>Historical aside: The ammonia cycle refrigerator as we know it was invented
>by Dr. Carl von Linde, who made  fortune selling his ice-making machinery
>around the world. He was the professor of theoretical engineering at the
>prestigious Polytechnikum in Munich at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian
>was in 1870. A German boy whose family had fled Paris because they were
>politically undesirable became his star student and went on to become world
>famous in his on right. His name was Rudolph Diesel.

There's some confusion here.  Linde invented a refrigeration cycle
using ammonia, and the Linde company is still big in both
refrigeration and ammonia.  But it's a compressor-type phase-change
cycle similar to the ones using Freons.  That's the cycle used in
commercial refrigeration and icemaking plants, not the absorption
cycle.  The compression cycle moves about five times as much heat per
unit of input energy, but it requires a motorized
compressor.  Ammonia gas is an excellent refrigerant and quite
inexpensive, but it's a bit nasty to keep around the house in a
system with pumps and seals.  Since fridges etc now use hermetically
sealed systems I don't know why Freon is preferred -- may well have
to do with the necessary pressures.

The three-gas absorption cycle used by Servel, Electrolux, Dometic
was developed in 1922 by a couple students at the Swedish Royal
Institute of Technology and commercialized the following year.

Yrs,
d