Regine January 18, 2005 design

How to break the “refrigeratorness”

Fridgy, by Israelian designer Yonatan Sadowsky, is a light folding portable refrigerator. Its soft insulating cover is a double layer of non-absorbent fabric filled with polyester fibers. Its cooling mechanism uses thermo-electric technology based on the Peltier Effect.

Fridgy got an Honorable Mention at the “Kitchen is the Heart of the Home” competition.

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1

Gizmodo on January 18, 2005 at 2:29 pm

Fridgy

Fridgy is a prototype piece from Israeli design Yonatan Sadowsky which aims to “break the ‘refrigeratorness’ of the common refrigerator,” most obviously by making use of a polyester fabric for its shell. Fridgy, which uses a Peltier-like cooling mechan…
2

jonah on January 19, 2005 at 6:06 pm

Peltier devices are nifty in theory but are so inefficient currently that it will be some time before something like this is practical. It’s important to note that the device lowers the temperature of something, but does not actually remove the energy, like a carnot cycle would. The heat still has to be dumped, by convection (fan) or conduction (thermal mass) in order for the device to work. Since the device is inefficient, the total amount of heat energy that has to be removed is significant.
Also, to remove the energy from the inside of the fridge here, there needs to be some sort of convection and a fin system to provide enough surface area to transfer the heat across. Thermal designers are often presented with peltier devices as this magic doohickey that will make warm things cool, but there are compounding factors that limit their praticality.
It is a cool (ha, pun) looking idea though.