A refrigerator is a device that is in every modern home. To maintain the health of the refrigerator, you must follow simple rules. One of the most important rules is not to put hot in the refrigerator.
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The most ordinary refrigerator has a typical operation scheme. All devices of this type use the same principle and the logic of their functioning has not changed for many years. Be it a home refrigerator or a production refrigerator in the workshop.
From an early age, children are taught that you can’t put hot in the refrigerator. To understand why this cannot be done, you need to deal with the device of a modern refrigerator. The mechanism of operation is simple and interesting.
The device of a modern refrigerator
Any classic refrigerator is a sealed chamber with a door. The walls are equipped with good thermal insulation. The use of thermal insulation is very high and, accordingly, the chamber must be airtight. The door is equipped with an elastic band. Rubber in the door of the refrigerator is special. It has the ability to magnetize to a metal casing and maintain a tight connection between the door and the casing. Magnetization is ensured by the presence of magnetic dust in the rubber compound. The use of such rubber bands allows you to make the door easy and do not make special latches.
A completely closed door ensures the tightness of the chamber and its thermal insulation. In addition to the body and door, the refrigerator consists of a compressor and a coil. A coil is a tube in which a special substance is located.
The design uses not one coil, but several at once. One is located on the back wall outside the refrigerator, and the second is inside the refrigerator compartment. The inner coil is hidden in the walls of the chamber behind a beautiful plastic lining.
The inner coil cools and the outer one heats up. This to some extent explains the logic of the refrigerator.
The principle of operation of the refrigerator
The trick that is used in the operation of the refrigerator is precisely the difference in temperature between the internal and external coils. This difference is achieved due to the different state of aggregation of the liquid. Here we need to focus on the fact that there is a special fluid inside the coils. This fluid is called refrigerant or freon.
Recalling the laws of physics from the school curriculum, one can pay attention to the patterns during the boiling process. In the process of boiling, energy is absorbed. This means that the ordinary vessel containing the boiling liquid will cool, because energy will be required to boil the liquid.
It is important to understand that this process cannot be compared with the boiling of a teapot whose walls are hot. In this case, the kettle itself heats the water. In the case described above, the liquid boils spontaneously. This is due to the pressure difference. The lower the pressure in the space where the liquid is, the lower its boiling point. Surely you know that high in the mountains a slight boiling of water is explained precisely by low pressure.
Now remember home refrigerators. Inside the walls of the refrigerator is a coil with freon, inside which the process of boiling takes place. When boiling freon, the coil cools down to about -18 degrees, which provides cold inside the refrigerator. This cold can be used to keep the temperature inside the chamber low.
In parallel with this process, the vapor from freon is compressed by the compressor of the refrigerator, turning back into liquid. Then it gets into the coil located outside the refrigerator, where it cools down. For effective cooling, the coil is equipped with a radiator. During the operation of the refrigerator, this radiator is always warm or hot.
Now the main question remains related to the cause of the conversion of freon into steam and its boiling inside the walls of the refrigerator. Here, too, everything is very simple. After all, the freon inside the refrigerator passes through a long and thin coil. This causes a relatively small pressure drop inside the system. Due to this drop in pressure, freon boils. This is what causes the use of special refrigerants. After all, not every liquid is able to boil with small pressure reductions. The mechanism of work is logical and understandable.