Forums

Forums
Sustainable Sidetra...
Well & Truly Off Th...
Einstein, 1930 and ...
 
Notifications
Clear all

Einstein, 1930 and US patent 1781541

 
Well & Truly Off The Grid
Last Post by Mars 4 years ago
1 Posts
1 Users
0 Reactions
1,679 Views
RSS
Mars
 Mars
(@editor)
Illustrious Member Admin
Joined: 4 years ago
Posts: 3338
Topic starter 02/05/2021 9:33 am  

Just read this really interesting fact that I never knew.

The patent was for a refrigerator.

Fridges seem to work despite the second law of thermodynamics, which says that heat always flows from a hotter to a colder body in a closed system. The get-out clause is ‘in a closed system’. A refrigerator gets away with it by consuming energy in order to pump heat to the outside, where it emerges from the radiator, usually located on the back.

When Einstein and Szilard invented their fridge, most current refrigerators operated using a poisonous gas as the refrigerant, which was kept under high pressure – an accident waiting to happen. In the 1920s, a German family was killed when the seal broke on the refrigerator and the gas escaped.

This led Einstein and Szilard to come up with a fridge design where there were no moving parts and the coolant was kept under constant pressure. It used a mix of two compounds, one of which could be quickly extracted to drop the pressure and hence the temperature. Einstein is usually thought of as unworldly and impractical, but he did have considerable experience of inventions from when he worked in the Swiss Patent Office.

This design is not widely used, but it has the advantage for developing-world applications of working with any source of heat, not just electricity.

Source: Clegg, Brian. “How Many Moons Does the Earth Have?"

Buy Bodge Buster – Homeowner Air Source Heat Pump Installation Guide: https://amzn.to/3NVndlU
From Zero to Heat Pump Hero: https://amzn.to/4bWkPFb

Subscribe and follow our Homeowners’ Q&A heat pump podcast


   
Quote
Forum Jump:
  Previous Topic
Next Topic  



Share:

Join Us!

RHH Awards

👉 Vote for “Heat Pump of the Year”

👉 Vote for “Best Manufacturer Customer Support”

👉 Nominate “Heat Pump Installation of Year”, “Best New Tech or Innovation” or “Turkey of the Year” here!

Latest Posts