Start-up makes refrigeration more efficient

24.01.2025

Source: E & M powernews

A start-up from Berlin aims to achieve energy savings of up to 75 percent in refrigeration technology with an IT solution. A solution for the heating market is set to follow.

The software, which Factor4Solutions has developed itself, is AI-supported. It is a fully automated solution for all types of refrigeration and enables system operators to save up to 75 percent of their annual electricity consumption. The developers see areas of application in the healthcare sector, the food industry and data centers, among others.

In a press release, the start-up promises that the AI-supported solution is "immediately deployable, open to manufacturers and technologies and easily scalable". As the system also works as a stand-alone application and offline, it is also suitable for critical infrastructures.

The founding team previously conducted research at the TU Berlin and developed the concept of the AI-supported system manager during their more than ten years of work there. The young entrepreneurs describe their initial problem as follows: Recooling plants and pumps often consume just as much electricity during cooling as the cooling generators themselves. In addition, the power requirement is usually only optimized at component level and often only for one operating state defined in the planning, which usually prevails in less than three percent of all operating hours. As a result, electricity is consumed unnecessarily in more than 90 percent of operating hours.

The system manager at Factor4Solutions, on the other hand, considers the operation of all relevant components and thus their energy requirements at the same time. A digital twin of the refrigeration system provides the basis for the calculations and forecasts.

The operation of the cooling generators and all auxiliary units is thus efficiency-based, depending on the weather conditions and the required output. The fully automated system manager achieves "the most efficient system operation in every load situation", the developers promise, emphasizing that users can specify desired target values for the optimization of costs, power consumption and CO2 emission reduction to the system.

According to Factor 4 Solutions, the company is currently working on adapting the IT system for use in the heating market, for example with heat pumps. According to Managing Director Stefan Petersen, the company aims to "decisively shape" the market for efficiency-based cooling and heating supply systems and establish itself internationally within five years.

Author: Fritz Wilhelm