"MMC" wrote in
:

Larry,
As I heard it, R-12 was banned because DOW Chemical's patent had run
out and they would have had competition. New product R-134a, new
patent, no competition!
Dirty enough to be true.
MMC


I'd buy that story. It sounds like something the average American
corporate bureaucracy could make happen....

How else could they get $8 for 12oz of 134a?

Remember "Rovac" back in 1967? Double-sided rotary compressor invented
by some physics professor, powered off a car engine in a big Plymouth
Fury sedan. It sucked in air from inside the car, in large volume about
as much as your car A/C does now, compressed it to 250 psi and pushed it
through a standard air conditioner condensor where the fan outside blew
the heat out of it. On the outlet side of the heat radiator, the cooled
air was released into the OTHER side of the rotary compressor vanes where
250 PSI dropped to atmospheric pressure, recovering a lot of the power it
took to do the compressing. The outlet air was frozen solid to -4C,
along with some snow caused by the water in the air freezing into rime
ice. Anaconda Corp came up with a heat exchanger on the cabin side that
filtered out the ice from the air and used the melting constant supply of
ice to cool the incoming air to the compressor making it even more
efficient. The exchanger was also a muffler to make it near totally
quiet so you couldn't hear the compressor pulses. The water vapor was
also re-deposited into the cabin air so the actual humidity in the car
was identical to what we started with, not dried out to desert humidity
like a regular airconditioning plant does. This keeping humidity
constant made Rovac VERY interesting to the meat cooling industry as it
wouldn't dry out the cooled meat like refridgerant systems do.

There was a Popular Mechanics or Popular Science piece done on it before
the freon magnates and their government hacks could squash it. It showed
5 Chrysler engineers in a big Plymouth Fury with a Rovac AC riding around
in the Mohave Desert where the OAT was 104F. With the Rovac wide open
and 5 sweaty engineers as a load, Rovac had the interior temperature of
the Plymouth down to 57F in the Mohave Desert! Overkill....(c;

Rovac used NO FREON, was very simple and HAD TO BE BURIED DEEP as it was
just TOO EASY! I'm sure DuPont had a LOT to do with its demise and
subsequent patent burial.....never to be heard from again.

Using no toxic gasses, we couldn't allow it to be built.....

Imagine it hooked to a little keel cooler in your engine
compartment.....hmmm....