Carrier Transicold has donated two NaturaLINE container refrigeration units to Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) to support commercial-scale research into transcritical carbon dioxide (CO2) refrigeration technology.
The research will help advance cooling systems designed to meet evolving environmental and regulatory requirements across the global cold chain.
The NaturaLINE system uses natural refrigerant for refrigerated container shipping applications.
CO2 is a naturally occurring refrigerant with a global warming potential (GWP) of 1, making it a lower-GWP alternative to traditional synthetic refrigerants used in commercial cooling. Improving the performance and efficiency of transcritical CO2 systems under a wide range of operating conditions remains a key focus of refrigeration research.
The Institute of Energy Engineering at TU Berlin will use the NaturaLINE units as a hands-on learning tool for graduate students.
Fitted with basic instrumentation, the units will allow students to measure temperature profiles, system pressures and power consumption, helping them learn directly on a real commercial system and gain firsthand insight into how transcritical CO2 differs from conventional refrigeration cycles.
The units will also form part of the institute’s research infrastructure. Researchers plan to integrate and evaluate prototype components inside the units to develop and test future heating and cooling systems, with performance assessed through automated test sequences.
Researchers also plan to conduct long-term performance evaluations across a range of operating conditions to better understand commercial-scale transcritical CO2 system behaviour.
Professor Stefan Elbel, Chair of Heat Transfer and Heat Conversion, Institute of Energy Engineering at Technische Universität Berlin, said as regulatory requirements tighten and the industry moves toward more sustainable refrigeration solutions, advancing this technology is critical.
Carrier Transicold Global Container vice president & general manager, Jean-Marie Carvalho, said transcritical CO2 systems are an important technology for the industry.
“By providing researchers with access to NaturaLINE container refrigeration units, we can help accelerate understanding of system performance, support future innovation and contribute to the development of more sustainable cold chain solutions,” Carvalho said.