Cold Vault - The idea

The there are two big reasons why fridges consume large amounts of energy. First, there is idle energy consumption used to keep the contents of the fridge and freezer cool. Heat gets into the fridge because it doesn’t have perfect thermal insulation. Heat gets in from all directions to varying degrees, but the biggest culprit is the seal around the door. The second main source is from opening the door and letting the warm room air mix with the cold fridge air. The door doesn’t have to be open for long to lose a lot of the of air that the fridge worked so hard to cool. It’s even worse with freezers (non-drawer style). If you watch from the side, you sometimes see the cold air pour out of the fridge (which you can see because it condenses the water in the air in the room).

The solution to these problems it to minimize the energy exchange between the fridge and the room. The way to do that is to rethink the way one interacts with a fridge. Normally, we open the door and look around for what we need and moves things, if necessary. This new fridge would have cameras on the inside and would take pictures from several angles of each item to produce a 3D reconstruction of the item. When the consumer wants something from the fridge, she would tap the screen on the front of the fridge and see a summary of the contents of the fridge. If something looked appealing, she would tap the image of the item and it would be moved to the exchange point. You can think of the exchange point as a box within the fridge, the front of the box is flush the front of the fridge and opens to let the consumer put things in and take things out. The back of the box can also open and close as part of the exchange. The front and back are never open at the same time which greatly minimizes the cold air loss.

The biggest engineering challenge is to maneuver the items around in the fridge to pack them efficiently. There are at least two ways to accomplish this task. First, a conveyor belt system could move things around. To have multiple levels (which would be important) the fridge would need a section of at least one of the level to be able to move up and down, which isn’t too crazy. The other way to solve this problem is to put each item on a tile and have the tiles shuffled around the fridge either using simple robotic arms to pick up the tiles or by moving the tiles via magnets (and an elevator to get between levels). There would be a magnet in every tile and electromatics under each level to move the tiles around. Other than the exchange point and the computer-organized contents of the fridge, everything else would be the same. Specifically, the cooling system would stay the same and the overall form factor would stay the same.