frigorie
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GC: n

CT: Refrigeration capacity. The thermal size of a refrigerator is known as its capacity, i.e. its cooling power, in watts in SI units, but sometimes older units are used in some places, as the frigorie/hour (4180/3600=1.16 W) or the ton (3575 W). It might be argued that it is more convenient to have a distinct unit for electrical power (the watt), a distinct unit for heating power (e.g. the calorie), a distinct unit for cooling power (e.g. the frigorie), etc., and then be able to say in a concise and clear manner that a domestic air-conditioner has for instance 1000 W, 1000 frigories and 1000 calories, instead of having to say that it has 1000 W of electrical consumption, and may give 1000 W of heating (used as heat pump) or 1000 W of refrigeration. Well, a more precise naming may help even at a cost of extended vocabulary, but not if different unit-conversion-factors are required.
The range of cooling powers demanded depend on application, from the small mini-bar refrigerator requiring some 100 W of refrigeration (and consuming some 100 W of electricity), to the typical single-room air-conditioner of 2 kW refrigeration (and 1 kW electrical consumption), to a typical bus air conditioning system of some 30 kW refrigeration (usually driven by the bus engine), to a department-store refrigeration system of some 10 MW refrigeration (usually driven by a cogeneration power plant; cogeneration is also termed ‘combined heat and power’, CHP; combined cooling heating and power, CCHP, is also known as trigeneration).
As a rule of thumb for space conditioning, refrigeration loads are similar to heating loads, since in both cases the objective is to compensate for the heat flow through the envelop, where K depends mainly on wall materials (fix), A is wall area (fix), and DT in summer and winter are of the same order of magnitude in temperate climates (well, it can be for instance some 25 ºC in winter, 20 ºC inside and -5 ºC outside, and 20 ºC in summer, 25 ºC inside and 45 ºC outside, but electrical and metabolic loads rest to the heating load in winter and add to the cooling load in summer, compensating somehow).

S: http://webserver.dmt.upm.es/~isidoro/bk3/c18/Refrigeration.docx (last access: 18 December 2014)

N: 1. a unit of refrigeration formerly used in Europe, equal to 1 (kilogram) Calorie per hour (4.1868 kilojoules per hour, or 3.9683 Btu per hour). The name was coined from the calorie by replacing the Latin calor, for heat, with frigor, for cold.
2. Abbreviation: fg.
3. A unit of rate of extraction of heat used in refrigeration 1 equal to 1000 fifteen-degree calories per hour or 1.16264 + 0.00014 Watt.
french unit of cold.

S: 1. http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/dictF.html (last access: 18 December 2014). 2. GDT. 3. TERMIUMPLUS.

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CR: [thermal solar energy]