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About an eighth of a University of Alberta collection of ice cores has melted due to a freezer malfunction:
A precious collection of ice cores from the Canadian Arctic has suffered a catastrophic meltdown. A freezer failure at a cold storage facility in Edmonton run by the University of Alberta (UA) caused 180 of the meter-long ice cylinders to melt, depriving scientists of some of the oldest records of climate change in Canada's far north.
The 2 April failure left "pools of water all over the floor and steam in the room," UA glaciologist Martin Sharp told ScienceInsider. "It was like a changing room in a swimming pool."
The melted cores represented 12.8% of the collection, which held 1408 samples taken from across the Canadian Arctic. The cores hold air bubbles, dust grains, pollen, and other evidence that can provide crucial information about past climates and environments, and inform predictions about the future.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:05PM (2 children)
As I recall the thermal transfer for compression heat pumps is 1/3 input electricity with 2/3 thermal power pumped out to the hot side. So the 1:5 factor seems like a lot.
Is there enough refrigerant oil to burn and that can actually ignite easily? it must leak out of the tubing I assume?
Anyway.. there's one thing missing. A monitoring system. Sure it was a pain in the ass when all that was available were 4-bit CPU with memory that you could type out with pen an paper. But these days with super integrated microelectronics, worldwide digital and cheap telecomms and abundant knowhow. How could they miss this? Something is seriously missing in this story.
If( temperature > too_high ) run_compressor();
if( temperature_derive > positive ) kill_compressor();
if( temperature > really_bad) alert_all_staff();
Temperature shield + Arduino + GSM module = Done!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:34PM (1 child)
COP depends very strongly on outside air temperature. I checked the weather and its just below freezing at night so the COP should be super high.
Refrigerant oils optimistically are refined not to burn well or easily but here they are in a multi-KW pump generating heat and wooshing around making mist so yeah it happens but not a common problem. There are flammable refrigerants, in fact propane is a pretty good refrigerant other than the whole explosion thing.
The problem with your design is the GSM shield, accounting cancelled that SIM card to "save money" etc. Or they used an ethernet wifi shield but IT didn't want to share and won't let it on the LAN without a windows virus scanner (even though its an arduino) and root access.
Also I've worked at datacenters with big Liebert chillers and we're all assuming the ice core freezer has cruder monitoring than the datacenter which is unlikely. What is likely is it was never set up or that part of the testing was removed from the contract to save money.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:23PM
With a GSM-adapter one can circumvent the whole IT-department. Any server would only need power and no department-LAN. I'll expect the managers of the freezer room to have enough clue about SIM card. There has to be some minimum standard. Or it's like instructing the heart surgeon as a patient on surgery 101 before sedation..
Contracts can be expensive. But they could at least done a simple monitoring setup by the local electronics club. I hope every decent university has one. Even a junk computerphone has all the necessary parts except the temperature probe.
Again, this story smells rat.