• Progress in Superconductivity and Cryogenics
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.20-24
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• 2024

Over the past four years, as the COVID-19 pandemic has struck the world, cold chain of COVID-19 vaccination has become a hot topic. In order to overcome the pandemic situation, it is necessary to establish a cold chain that maintains a low-temperature environment below approximately 203K (-70℃), which is the appropriate storage temperature for vaccines, from vaccine suppliers to local hospitals. Usually, cryocoolers are used to maintain low temperatures, but it is difficult for small-scale local distribution to have cryocooler due to budget and power supply issues. Accordingly, in this paper, a cryogenic TSU (Thermal storage unit) system for vaccination cold chain is designed that can maintain low temperatures below -70℃C for a long time without using a cryocooler. The performance of the TSU system according to the energy storage material for using as TSU is experimentally evaluated. In the experiments, four types of cold storage materials were used: 20% DMSO aqueous solution, 30% DMSO aqueous solution, paraffin wax, and tofu. Prior to the experiment, the specific heat of the cold storage materials at low temperature were measured. Through this, the thermal diffusivity of the materials was calculated, and paraffin wax had the lowest value. As a result of the TSU system's low-temperature maintenance test, paraffin wax showed the best low-temperature maintenance performance. And it recorded a low-temperature maintenance time that was about 24% longer than other materials. As a result of analyzing the temperature trend by location within the TSU system, it was observed that heat intrusion from the outside was not well transmitted to the low temperature area due to the low thermal conductivity of paraffin wax. Therefore, in the TSU system for vaccine storage, it was experimentally verified that the lower the thermal diffusivity of the cold storage material, the better low temperature maintenance performance.

• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
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• v.59 no.3
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• pp.345-358
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• 2021

This study focuses on the development of the liquid air production process that uses LNG (liquefied natural gas) cold energy which usually wasted during the regasification stage. The liquid air can be transported to the LNG exporter, and it can be utilized as the cold source to replace certain amount of refrigerant for the natural gas liquefaction. Therefore, the condition of the liquid air has to satisfy the available pressure of LNG storage tank. To satisfy pressure constraint of the membrane type LNG tank, proposed process is designed to produce liquid air at 1.3bar. In proposed process, the air is precooled by heat exchange with LNG and subcooled by nitrogen refrigeration cycle. When the amount of transported liquid air is as large as the capacity of the LNG carrier, it could be economical in terms of the transportation cost. In addition, larger liquid air can give more cold energy that can be used in natural gas liquefaction plant. To analyze the effect of the liquid air production amount, under the same LNG supply condition, the proposed process is simulated under 3 different air flow rate: 0.50 kg/s, 0.75 kg/s, 1.00 kg/s, correspond to Case1, Case2, and Case3, respectively. Each case was analyzed thermodynamically and economically. It shows a tendency that the more liquid air production, the more energy demanded per same mass of product as Case3 is 0.18kWh higher than Base case. In consequence the production cost per 1 kg liquid air in Case3 was $0.0172 higher. However, as liquid air production increases, the transportation cost per 1 kg liquid air has reduced by $0.0395. In terms of overall cost, Case 3 confirmed that liquid air can be produced and transported with $0.0223 less per kilogram than Base case.