India’s ammonia refrigeration industry gathered at ARCON 2018 in Delhi

The ARCON 2018 represented a further component of global events focussing on natural refrigeration solutions. Being Asia’s only convention on ammonia refrigeration so far and organised by the Association of Ammonia Refrigeration (AAR), the conference and exhibition took place in India’s capital Delhi on 19 January 2018.

Formed in 2012, the AAR as a national organisation has currently about 50 corporate and 290 individual members engaged in the field of ammonia refrigeration industry from all over India. It aims to promote the safe use of ammonia (NH₃) as an environmentally friendly refrigerant through seminars, trainings, information, guidelines and industrial standards.

The 5^th ARCON conference brought together about 250 experienced industry professionals, equipment manufacturers, contractors, operators and end-users, mainly from dairy, cold storage and other food processing industry. The objective was to exchange on new trends of ammonia-based technologies and solutions and the advantage of ammonia over hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC) and hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants. AAR premium corporate partners (Evapco, Frick India, Arctic Refrigeration, Kirloskar Pneumatic, W.X.R., GEA, Thermofin) presented their newest products of compressors, chillers, freezers, condensers and heat pumps, including low-charge solutions, showing an increasing worldwide spread of applications using ammonia.

Technical presentations shed light on the latest developments in ammonia refrigeration design in Europe (GEA) and the vital role of ammonia-based technologies in reaching the EU’s HFC phase-down targets (Öko-Recherche). Although ammonia has been available in Europe for many years, it has been used almost exclusively in large industrial refrigeration. However, it was shown that the trend in Europe is to develop efficient two-stage and NH₃/CO₂ cascade systems and that for safety reasons using ammonia in low-charge systems is becoming increasingly important. Given the urgent need of saving energy in the future, the use of waste energy from cooling processes through heat recovery was highlighted. Concerning countries with high ambient temperatures (< 40°C) like India, a study carried out by Öko-Recherche for the EU Commission also showed that ammonia can be used as HCFC/HFC alternative in large industrial and stationary air conditioning systems without any loss of energy efficiency.

Further presentations covered the refrigerant use in India (Rinac India), low-charge ammonia solutions that already show high energy performance (Thermofin), some insights into the status and projection of refrigerant use in industrial refrigeration in Japan and the advantages of an energy efficient and environmentally friendly NH₃/CO₂ secondary cooling system, which has already been adopted by many refrigerated warehouses and food processing factories (Mayekawa). Moreover, guidance was given on how to apply the AAR standard for designing safe and energy efficient ammonia refrigeration systems (ASHRAE). In a panel discussion on the advantage of ammonia as refrigerant, further technical aspects and questions from the audience were discussed.

The conference ended successfully with a networking dinner. For further information visit www.ammoniaindia.org.