this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
1029 points (95.6% liked)
Microblog Memes
6036 readers
3481 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Pointless discussion, but they're all heat pumps. Refrigeration cycle is the name of the physical process. Most heat pumps make use of that thermodynamic principle, but there are some niche ones that don't. But people don't care about that, and so find it more useful to call them by what their purpose is, and that varies locally.
Actually that's wrong. When we build food refrigerators using peltier modules, it's still a refrigerator. The reverse carnot cycle is just one type of refrigeration cycle, reverse rankine and reverse brayton cycles still count.
Sure you could call them all heat pumps, and you might be technically right. Nobody actually calls them that though. Most people probably haven't figured out that an AC unit, a heat pump, and a food refrigerator are all actually the same concept in different dressing and sizes.
It's only an irrelevant topic if you can actually communicate clearly, which is actually very hard as almost no one understands this stuff. Especially in the UK where this is all viewed as newfangled, expensive, and unreliable technology. To be fair they aren't wrong in this country: the way we handle, specify, and install ASHPs makes them feel and act inferior to a good old condensing gas boiler. It's a sad state of affairs.
I was referring to electrocaloric, and Stirling engine heat pumps.
There are currently no production heat pumps using the electrocaloric effect to my knowledge. Stirling engine I doubt as well. Either way still classes as refrigeration. In fact a Stirling engine heat pump/refrigerator would still need refrigerant as it needs a working fluid.
Edit: also pretty sure a Stirling engine is an implementation of a carnot engine