Evaporative supercooling method for ice production

Producing ice with supercooled water is a favourable method for ice-storage. However, it undergoes the problems of often unexpected ice blockage and heavy electric power consumption. To improve, this paper proposes a new method: it evaporates water to supercooled state in an atmosphere of low humidity instead of supercooling water inside a heat exchanger; liquid dehumidification reproduces the atmosphere of low humidity to form a cycle. In theoretical analysis made about the evaporative supercooling, we ameliorate the traditional evaporation model to predict the temperature variation. To the experimental research, we adopted particle dynamics analyzer and infrared camera to examine the physical process, and it got ice with this new method. The theoretical results agree well with the experimental results. Also, it found this new method cannot only solve the ice blockage problem, but also reduce the electric power consumption and raise the efficiency. Compared with the conventional supercooled water method, the highest performance improvement can arrive at 98%. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.