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Post by turbokinetic on Jun 23, 2018 19:55:17 GMT
This really, totally amazes me.
The Waukesha engine company (still in business today) produced a small 4-cycle gas engine with a built in refrigerant compressor.
The engine had a small gas tank which you would fill with fuel once each day. The engine would then be started and run for about 2 hours before the fuel was exhausted. This would provide cooling for the fridge cabinet for the rest of the 24 hour day.
I'm not sure if it froze water to maintain cooling throughout the day, or how it saved up cooling from its two hour run.
Look at this page, and be sure to open the PDF of the Waukesha brochure they have on the site.
www.wehs.net/refrig-unit.html
Sincerely, David
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Post by ckfan on Jun 23, 2018 23:38:27 GMT
This thing is a game changer. I have seen similar setups to power old Maytag washers but this is awesome! It isn’t hermetic, it would be direct drive I imagine. It must have a brine around the evaporator that it cools off. So cool!
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Post by turbokinetic on Jun 24, 2018 1:09:01 GMT
This thing is a game changer. I have seen similar setups to power old Maytag washers but this is awesome! It isn’t hermetic, it would be direct drive I imagine. It must have a brine around the evaporator that it cools off. So cool! Yeah, this would be a holy grail bucket list fridge for any collector.
From a technical standpoint, the only way the compressor end could be truly hermetic is if there was a magnetic drive coupling with a solid divider between the engine and the compressor. I don't think they had that sort of technology back then, so surely there is a set of seals between the two parts of the unit. Not sure what gas it used, but any known refrigerant (other than HC gases) is highly dangerous if it gets pulled into an engine. Surely the sealing / separation of the refrigerant from the engine was a well thought out part of the device.
If I ever find one of these, be assured I will try mightily to acquire it!
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Post by ckfan on Jun 24, 2018 1:52:55 GMT
Being that the unit was made in 34 I would think it would use SO2, as that was the standard at that time. R12 was just coming into the market and many manufacturers took a while to switch to it (I’m looking at you GE!). Some manufacturers quickly took to it though. Westinghouse was using it by 37. In fact I have a 37 Westy with its original charge and it works great! The only compressor I’ve ever read about which used a magnetic hermetic coupling never went far. It was in a paper documented by GE when they were looking to different manufacturers to get ideas about making their own hermetic unit. Apparently it was French made and used a very thin piece of non ferrous metal to allow the magnetic field of the stator outside of the compressor to rotate the rotor inside of the compressor. That’s one way to do it. In practice though it was very inefficient and most of that wasted energy was deposited as heat onto that poor piece of thin metal.
Anyways, I Love the idea of this gas powered fridge. It only costs 2.5 cents to run a day (in 1934)!
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Post by turbokinetic on Jun 24, 2018 2:27:21 GMT
Being that the unit was made in 34 I would think it would use SO2, as that was the standard at that time. R12 was just coming into the market and many manufacturers took a while to switch to it (I’m looking at you GE!). Some manufacturers quickly took to it though. Westinghouse was using it by 37. In fact I have a 37 Westy with its original charge and it works great! The only compressor I’ve ever read about which used a magnetic hermetic coupling never went far. It was in a paper documented by GE when they were looking to different manufacturers to get ideas about making their own hermetic unit. Apparently it was French made and used a very thin piece of non ferrous metal to allow the magnetic field of the stator outside of the compressor to rotate the rotor inside of the compressor. That’s one way to do it. In practice though it was very inefficient and most of that wasted energy was deposited as heat onto that poor piece of thin metal. Anyways, I Love the idea of this gas powered fridge. It only costs 2.5 cents to run a day (in 1934)!
Interesting about the French hermetic (rotor only) design! The French have their own way of engineering things.....
I bet that metal shell inside the stator, along with the excesive clearance between the rotor and stator caused by it really made the motor horribly inefficient! That nonferrous lining of the stator would be like a "shorted" and "non-rotating" rotor winding.
With the modern neodymium magnetic couplings of today, a simple coupling design could be done quite easily; as is done in the chemical industry for pumps now-a-days.
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Post by elec573 on Jun 26, 2018 2:13:27 GMT
Check out the gas powered Electrolux I found on craglist below this posting thought it unique.
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Post by turbokinetic on Jun 26, 2018 2:26:48 GMT
Check out the gas powered Electrolux I found on craglist below this posting thought it unique.
Link didn't show.... Sorry!
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