During the annual IIAR Industrial Refrigeration Conference & Exhibition, industry experts will come together to present technical papers at the IIAR Technical Program. This year’s papers will address several key categories, including carbon dioxide, security, and safety.

Eric Smith, IIAR’s vice president and technical director, said the papers provide breadth and depth that isn’t available in any other refrigeration-specific conference. Several papers stand out within this year’s lineup.

Cybersecurity in Automated Industrial Systems by Josh Symonds, CrossnoKaye, will address the risks associated with the automation and internet control of facilities. Classes of attacks that were formerly the purview of Internet applications could become commonplace in industrial infrastructure.

“Cybersecurity is increasingly important as refrigeration systems are more and more automated and, thus, more and more susceptible to hacking or errors made by even authorized people,” Smith said. “The ransomware phenomena are gaining in popularity and we don’t want our industry to be a part of it.”

On a different note, the use of carbon dioxide is increasing, and relief calculations are an important piece in the appropriate design of CO2 systems. “What has been recognized for several years now is that when CO2 refrigeration systems operate transcritically, the traditional methods of determining relief valve capacity are invalid,” he said. “Bill Greulich, who chairs the IIAR Research Committee, realized that at least one good method to evaluate the relief valve capacity for supercritical operation already exists and this paper provides the beginning of a solution to solve the question of how to select such relief valves. ”

In the paper Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Relief Calculations, Greulich, Kensington Consulting, and Cilliers Kruger, Korf Technology Ltd., will present an overview with a worked example of a rigorous two-step, isobaric – isentropic calculation method, commonly known as the Homogenous Direct Integration (HDI) method, to determine the maximum required orifice size for any carbon dioxide relieving condition expected in refrigeration service.

“Our goal is to remove the guesswork,” Smith said. “We hope that it will lead to easily used formulas and tables that will be appropriate for selecting these relief valves. Should this method find acceptance, the next step will be to integrate it into the IIAR CO2 standard. More work to address downstream relief piping is expected to follow.”

Transcritical CO2 heat pumps are emerging as a viable alternative to synthetic air or water source heat pumps. They present an opportunity for electrification while eliminating the use of high GWP refrigerants. The technical paper Performance Analysis of CO2 Heat Pump Modes for Refrigeration Systems: A Case Study by William Slope, Frédérick Lavallée-Trubiano, and Tommy Dolbec, Air Treatment Corp., assess the coefficient of performance of CO2 heat pumps at varying supply and return temperatures.

“This is pertinent—it is all about decarbonizing the atmosphere,” Smith said. “There is an obvious need not to be so reliant on natural gas and coal and there is a worldwide trend to decarbonize and save energy. Heat pumps offer a way to achieve some of this goal.”

There are more and more applications for heat pumps, particularly in industrial and large commercial settings where they can potentially save a lot of energy and expense by using waste heat and also heat from the atmosphere. “Heat pumps are coming into play to take the place of traditional heating technologies,” Smith said. “This paper is a case study of a real-world
installation and nicely lays out the considerations for optimal operation.”

There will be several papers presented in Spanish, including some that are translations and representations of previously provided papers. “There have been a lot of great papers in the past written in English and presented in English and we know there is a strong need for this information to be disseminated to Spanish-speaking professionals,” Smith said, adding that IIAR expects a large contingency of Spanish-speaking attendees.