Rapid Cool Refrigerator Compartment

After some activities in some weathers, a cold beer is a medical necessity. It's for this reason the walk-in cooler at the local beer place breaks down; it's cooling much more beer and operating at a much trickier temperature gradient. So now you're taking warm beer home with a plan involving your fridge.

A 6-pack placed in a conventional refrigerator will cool to a satisfactory temperature, but not before the patient is dead. The fastest way to cool the beer is to take a big bowl, fill with ice and add a generous scoop of salt*, or some pure alcohol if you don't think you'll need that later. Now you add a single beer and spin it. There's a few things going on here. 1st, the bowl of salty-icy water has much better specific heat capacity and density than air increasing thermal conductivity with the beer container**. 2nd, the presence of salt has significantly depressed the freezing point of water. So now you have a liquid that perfectly contacts the entire surface of the container and it's several degrees below 0°C. Next, you have the ice. The enthalpy of crystallization is huge. This is just a fancy way of saying that it takes a lot of energy to melt ice. In this context it means that as the beer cools down, it won't meaningfully increase the temperature of the water.

The easiest way to cool the beer is to place it in the freezer. Ideally arranged in a flat layer buried under layers of frozen peas etc. This works because the freezer is much colder than the refrigerator, ~-17°C*** or so. This works well, and patient treatment can commence in as little as 10 minutes, which is how long it takes to shower the grime off. Unfortunately, patients self-administering such treatment regimes leads to a 72.6% chance that one beer remains hidden under a bag of multi-color corn, where it will explode, leading to regret and bad language. So what to do?

Well, temperature sensors and control electronics are excellent and very cheap nowadays. So, inside the refrigerator is a compartment about the size of a large 6-pack. Let's be generous here, the patient will not appreciate the compartment if it doesn't work because Coors cans are very slightly taller than average. We place the 6-pack in the compartment and close the door. Then a soothing and obvious button with LED-illuminated: "rapid cool" is pressed. A surprisingly robust 12V fan then begins forcing air through the compartment at an almost concerning rate. The temperature sensor will sense beer-warmed air in the compartment exhaust and turn the LED illumination orange. 4°C isn't particularly cold for people born ~200 miles further north than Calgary. It's shorts weather. However, add a raging 50mph wind and you get cold fast. That's what we're doing here. It's a reverse air fryer for beer.

Inside the compartment, the temperature controller keeps the fan running until the air entering and leaving the compartment are the same. Obviously this will warm the refrigerator interior, but that's already temperature controlled and the compressor will kick on in the usual way. When cooling is complete, a loud but crucially SINGLE beep should be heard. The LED has now turned back to a reassuring blue.

For married self-medicators, an alternative door is shipped with the refrigerator. The door confidently depicts that the contents of the compartment are critical mechanical things connected with maintenance/filtration etc. This should ensure that the beer compartment is not filled with bags of unnecessary leaves at the critical moment.

* This is a good use for that last 1/3rd bag of snow melt that's sitting in the space between the HVAC unit and the water heater. Water softener salt and snow melt are the same thing in the bs0 household.

** aluminum cans are far superior to bottles here. Avoid insulating labels/paint for peak performance.

*** in science, we use a lot of domestic-style refrigerator/freezer combos. They're cheaper than the units that science companies want to sell you, which are obviously re-branded domestic units at 5x the price and some meaningless certificates. They're supposed to be at 4°C and -20°C respectively. However, in use the average throughout the day is closer to 5°C/-15°C. So in my lab we use units from the catering industry: all stainless steel built in temperature alarms, no stupid screens, available spare parts. They're 2-3x the price, but worth it because they also look cooler.