How do refrigerated vans work?
It’s a great question.
A gigantic fridge on wheels, indeed, but how do they work on such a large scale in a mobile format?
Refrigerated trucks are designed to carry perishable goods at specific temperatures, so there are a wide range of different vehicles with different specifications to ensure nothing goes wrong. They can be ice-cooled, equipped with a mechanical refrigeration system or utilise a cooling agent like carbon dioxide.
A wide range of of businesses utilise refrigerated vans to meet the demands of an ever increasing on year as the cold chain continues to develop. These industries rely on the different refrigerated vans with different functions to get the job done, from florists to fishmongers and everything in between.
But how do they work?
The short answer is that they work in the same was as any household fridge. The units inside the storage facility in the back of any refrigerated van are fit with the same technology that has been keeping your milk from going off for the past 70 years, they absorb heat in an insulated airtight compartment and dissipate that heat outside of the compartment.
The major components required for a refrigerated van to work are:
Condenser
You will have most likely seen this piece of the puzzle on the top of any refrigerated van, and wondered just what it actually does.
Inside the condenser there is a coil which houses a series of tubes and fins, and just like a car radiator, this device passes air over the condenser coil which is full of sealed refrigerant tubes.
The hot gas condenses into a liquid refrigerant when inside these tubes whilst the excess, unneeded heat is dissipated to the atmosphere.
The cooled liquid refrigerant then passes to the evaporator.
Evaporator
The evaporator can be found inside the load space. Here there is another series of tubes and fins called the evaporator coil, it looks much like the condenser.
The liquid refrigerant created by the condenser is channeled into the coil through a valve. As it enters the coil tubes it evaporates at a very low temperature.
One fan, or a series of fans depending on the size of the storage unit then circulates air over the coil and into the load space. This is, essentially, how the internal temperature is reduced.
The refrigerant gas exits as a low-pressure gas and returns to the compressor.
Compressor
The compressor is included to pump the coolant around the system and ensure that the temperature is consistently regulated. Once it has taken low-pressure refrigerant gas from the evaporator, it compresses it into a hot high-pressure gas and pushes it out to the condenser for the cooling cycle to start all over again.
Overall, each element of the refrigeration unit works together to remove heat from inside the vehicle so that the produce being transported can be held at the required temperature.
