International. For more than a year, a group of experts from the International Refrigeration Institute (IIR) and ASHRAE have been working together to establish common definitions of five essential words that characterize the refrigeration sector.
Both organizations have agreed on the following definitions:
Cooling:
(1) Heat removal, which usually results in a lower temperature change and/or phase.
(2) Lowering the temperature.
Refrigeration:
(1) Cooling of a space, substance or system to lower and/or maintain its temperature below room temperature (removed heat is rejected at a higher temperature).
(2) Artificial cooling.
Chilling:
Cooling of a substance without freezing it.
Freezing:
Change of solidification phase of a liquid or the liquid content of a substance, usually due to cooling.
Cold chain:
Series of actions and equipment applied to keep a product within a specific low temperature range from harvest/production to consumption.
Jean-Luc Dupont, head of the IIR's Department of Scientific and Technical Information, said: "It was important that any differences that might exist in these definitions between the IIR and ASHRAE be erased for consistency. It now seems important to us to achieve greater harmonization at the international level in order to establish universal definitions."
To this end, the IIR has called on all national and regional organizations and associations to adopt and disseminate these definitions.
For its part, the Institute will disseminate these definitions as widely as possible, adopt them in all its publications and promote them, in particular, at the next International Refrigeration Congress to be held in Montreal, Canada, from 24 to 30 August 2019. .
The IIR, like ASHRAE, has its own dictionary. It contains 4,300 words in all fields of refrigeration, including air conditioning, and its translations into 11 languages. It also includes the definitions of these terms in English and French
