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Impression of 21st International Congress of Refrigeration |
Ruzhu Z. Wang
Prof. Dr., Director, Institute of refrigeration and Cryogenics,
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
President, Shanghai Society of Refrigeration
The five day program of ICR2003 in Washington D.C. (Aug.17-22, 2003) was very busy. The overarching theme of the Congress is Serving the Needs of Mankind. The Congress was a celebration of how refrigeration has -- and continues to -- serve the world's need for safe food, efficient industry, widespread medical care, and physical comfort. The IIR Congress is held every four years and is the major forum for the exchange of technical information involving refrigeration. The IIR's mission is to promote knowledge of refrigeration technology and all its applications in order to address today's major issues, including food safety and protection of the environment (reduction of global warming, protection of the ozone layer), and the development of the least developed countries (food, health). The IIR commits itself to improving quality of life and promotes sustainable development. The total participants this time were estimated as 700.
The well researched areas for refrigeration and air conditioning equipments are heat pump, sorption cooling etc.. For example, there are 157 papers related to heat pump, 40 related to absorption, 12 to adsorptiion, 7 to desiccant. There are 22 papers dealing with CO2 refrigerant, 9 papers related to ammonia refrigeration. For the fundamental researches of refrigeration and its applications, there are 150 papers related to heat transfer,35 to thermal physical properties.
BCHP is a warming research area, the research projects of DOE-USA has been paid more attention through short courses and also technical visit. But there are limited researched papers in this issue, this is possibly due to the not enough studies, the researchers have focused more on the system integration, less on their thermal economic studies. The current 10-year payback period is its obstacle to develop such system quickly.
As usual, ICR has include a lot of research papers in the area of food science and preservation, Cryogenics, HVAC systems and IAQ. The last 20th ICR was held in Sydney, there were more than 1500 participants. The 21st ICR in Washington had a small participants possibly due to the politics in USA, and also the SARS influences of this spring. The next 22nd ICR will be held in Beijing in 2007. Anyway ICR has established a good worldwide platform for exchanges of the experiences in refrigeration and HVAC area.