Question

An inventor claims to have developed a refrigerator that at steady state requires a net power input of 1.1 horsepower to remove 12,000 Btu/h of energy by heat transfer from the freezer compartment at 0°F and discharge energy by heat transfer to a kitchen at 70°F. Evaluate this claim.

Answer 1

The inventor's claim is false in the sense that no thermal machine can violate the first thermodynamic law.

Step-by-step explanation:

The inventor's claim could not be possible as no thermal machine can transfer more heat than the input work consumed. If we expose the thermal efficiency:

`n=Q out / W in`

Where Q and W both must be in the same power unit, so we will convert the remove heat from BTU/hr to hp:

`12000 BTU/hr = 4.72 hp`

Therefore by comparing, we notice that the removing heat of 4.75 hp is large than the delivered work of 1.11 hp. By evaluating the efficiency:

[tex]n=4.75 hp / 1.1 hp = 4.3 > 1[/tex]