The Innovative Green Technology for Refrigerators - Development of Innovative Linear Compressor -

Abstract

Since 2000, LGE has produced the Linear Compressors for household refrigerators, and several million linear compressors have been operating in Korea and Europe.For producing the Linear Compressors, LGE has solved lots of reliability problems, for example, accurate driving of the free piston.For the capacity modulation, the displacement modulation operation is used in the LG linear compressor, instead of changing operating frequency.As expected, the small displacement operation leads to large dead volume.There is a misunderstanding that the efficiency of linear compressors in the small cooling capacity is lower, because it has a large dead-volume.However, LGE found that the dead volume doesn't influence the efficiency of compressor; on the other hand, the most important factors are the motor and mechanical efficiency.Deeper analysis of the motor and mechanical efficiency with the variation of the piston diameter and displacement shows that the efficiency with a large dead volume can be much higher.Finally, LGE created the Innovative Linear Compressor, which has much higher efficiency in the small cooling capacity.Also, the refrigerator with this linear compressor shows that the power consumption reduction by 25% can be achieved, as compared with the reciprocating compressors, and CO 2 reduction of the linear compressor is equivalent to the absorption by 9 pines.Based on the outstanding CO 2 reduction, LG linear compressors will be the one of Green technology to keep the global clean.