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Necissity is the mother of invention..
PS, for you observant folks: the clinic's refridgerator, used ONLY for
medicines, ran on propane, and the diesel generator was turned out only
mid-day for cooling the clinic and at night for heating (temps can vary
from 0 C at night to 50 C in the day).
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Back before freon was discovered, propane was commonly used as a
refrigerant gas. Of course, this is very dangerous. The way
refrigerators work is that when gases are compressed, they heat
up, and when they expand, they cool down. For instance, a diesel
engine works by compressing air until it reaches 1000F and then spraying
atomized diesel fuel into the hot, compressed air. Heating air to 1000F
is one thing, but compressing and thus heating up propane gas is another,
more dangerous, matter.
No less than Albert Einstein took the hand of necessity as the mother
of invention here and invented three different types of refrigerators
that used effects of magnetic fields to cool one area at the expense of
heating up another. These should work well in practice and would be safe,
so he decided to market them, and found a venture capitalist to back the
idea.
But Einstein was a much better theoretical physicist than businessman,
and his refrigerators were highly unsuccessful in the marketplace, finally
being killed off completely by the discovery of the inert refrigerant gas,
freon, and other fluorocarbons.
Of course, these gases rise to the stratosphere and bind free radicals of
oxygen, blocking the regeneration of ozone that protects us from excessive
UV radiation from the sun. Perhaps had Einstein's refrigerators been more
successful, we wouldn't now have this problem as a replacement for explosive
refrigerators.
Joseph
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