CO2LD: An innovation educational project for High Degree Professional Training in Refrigeration

Abstract

Refrigeration is one of the technology sectors which has suffered most changes in the last twenty years, because of the negative impact of the fluids used in the refrigeration cycles, the refrigerants, due to their impact in the ozone layer and the promotion of the global warming. Due to the negative impacts of the fluids, the European Union has established several directives to restrict the use of refrigerant fluids, causing the need of adaptation of the sector to the new regulations.

The adaptation of the refrigeration sector to the new regulations must be done by all agents involved, included the training and education of the future refrigeration technicians. To allow this, the project CO2LD has been developed to introduce the future technology in the High Degree Professional Training in Refrigeration. The objective of the project consisted on introducing more efficient and more sustainable refrigeration systems, R134a/CO₂ cascade cycles, in the studies of High Degree Professional Training in Refrigeration, and create a collaborative framework among students, secondary-schools, refrigeration technicians, refrigeration companies and the University to facilitate the know-how transfer. This paper presents the objectives of the project, describes its development and analyses the main conclusions of it.