Emerson Donates Unique Refrigeration Technology
Sustainable architecture will benefit grocery store in food desert
Emerson donated a unique, sustainable refrigeration architecture that was developed at its Helix Innovation Center in Dayton, Ohio, to the city’s Gem City Market – a collaborative grocery store that provides fresh food amid a local food desert.
The Gem City Market is a Dayton Foundation cooperative market initiative to help address food insecurity in downtown Dayton, which has been designated a “food desert” by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service. Food deserts are defined as regions with a 20% or greater poverty rate and where a third or more of the residents live more than one mile from retail outlets selling healthy and affordable food.
To help ensure safe, high quality food at the market, Emerson donated its Copeland™ scroll booster refrigeration architecture – the first technology to be commercially developed at Emerson’s Helix Innovation Center in Dayton. Emerson’s scroll booster technology enables Gem City to combine a low-pressure, low GWP refrigerant with a distributed architecture, which is emerging as a sustainable alternative to large centralized systems.
While its design flexibility lends itself to store formats of varying sizes, the distributed scroll booster technology addresses various modern supermarket refrigeration priorities, including:
- Sustainability: Low-GWP, A1 refrigerant (e.g., R-513A) and reduced refrigerant charge.
- Serviceability: System familiarity with technicians and end users.
- Stability: Low total cost of ownership; from lower annual energy consumption and lifecycle climate performance, lower leak rates due to lower-pressure system and lower utility costs.
- Security: Secure remote facility monitoring capabilities.
In the future, as even lower-GWP refrigerants (such as A2Ls) are approved for use by applicable codes and standards, the Copeland scroll booster can be adapted for use with alternative refrigerants (less than 150 GWP).
“Creating innovative technologies that help the communities we call home is fundamental to our identity and purpose as a company,” said Jamie Froedge, executive president of Emerson’s Commercial & Residential Solutions business. “We are proud to put this technology to work and meet a community need in Dayton, where we researched and developed this leading-edge solution.
“The industries we serve have long sought environmentally responsible approaches that offer the same high performance. This inventive architecture will make a significant impact for retailers – and make advanced refrigeration solutions more accessible for small-format retail stores who want to make sustainable choices.”
Emerson, along with business partners Hussmann and Chemours, donated refrigeration equipment in service of the Gem City Market collaborative initiative. Donations include assembly components and 10 low temperature booster systems from Emerson; the assembled refrigeration system from Hussmann; and low-GWP refrigerant Opteon™ XP10 (R-513A) from Chemours.
Want more HVAC industry news and information? Join The NEWS on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn today!
Looking for quick answers on air conditioning, heating and refrigeration topics? Try Ask ACHR NEWS, our new smart AI search tool. Ask ACHR NEWS
Looking for a reprint of this article?
From high-res PDFs to custom plaques, order your copy today!
