Inficold is a leading refrigeration / cold chain company that designs and manufactures cold storages, milk coolers, PCM packs/pouches and air conditioners. These systems have inbuilt thermal energy storage to provide fast cooling rates, short precooling times, and cooling redundancy during power failure. Inficold cold chain system systems enable high product quality at the lowest operating cost.

Refrigeration systems are traditionally operated with compressors. The entire system works in suboptimal conditions most of the time, which are as following:

• The system is oversized during low cooling requirement period, resulting in frequent on-off cycling of the compressor. This also creates high temperature / humidity fluctuations and icing over the evaporator coil.
• The system is undersized during high cooling requirement period, resulting in long duration to achieve the desired temperature. Furthermore, the compressor may be always on, compromising its lifetime.

In both such scenarios, the end results are poor quality of the stored commodity, poor system efficiency and higher chances of system failure.

In addition, most of the cold chain systems across the globe are backed with an alternate energy source such as electric batteries or a diesel generator to provide cooling during grid failure. There are issues with these back up power systems:

• There is a higher probability of failure if such backup energy sources are not frequently used, and thus not regularly maintained – a common problem faced in developed countries.
• In contrast, the excessive use of electric batteries and diesel generators results in high operating expenses – a common problem faced in developing countries.
• Electric batteries have limited cycling life and diesel generators require frequent oil changes and maintenance. Both also do not address the variable cooling requirements.

Thermal energy storage is an elegant option to address these issues. It also has a critical function in integrating solar photovoltaics with cold chain. It is well known that either grid or electric batteries are required to make solar photovoltaics panel even work. Electric batteries are expensive, hazardous, fire prone and do not address the variable cooling requirements.

Inficold has addressed both these challenges with its award-winning thermal energy storage and off-grid solar integration. Thermal energy storage developed by Inficold stores cooling in phase change material for a comprehensive application in the temperature range of -25 to 28 ⁰C. Inficold has also integrated compressor with solar photovoltaics without the need for grid and electric batteries.