The role of secondary refrigerants is expected to grow as the focus on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions increases. The effectiveness of secondary refrigerants can be improved when phase changing media are introduced in place of single phase media. Operating at temperatures below the freezing point of water, ice slurry facilitates several efficiency improvements such as reductions in pumping energy consumption as well as lowering the required temperature difference in heat exchangers due to the beneficial thermo-physical properties of ice slurry. Research has shown that ice slurry can be engineered to have ideal ice particle characteristics so that it can be easily stored in tanks without agglomeration and then be extractable for pumping at very high ice fraction without plugging. In addition ice slurry can be used in many direct contact food and medical protective cooling applications.

(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3081589/)

Argonne researchers have created a bio-compatible saline ice slurry that could save lives by preventing ischemic damage to organs during surgery or certain types of medical crises. http://phys.org/news144949439.html

In this paper, we show, for the first time, the key link between scaffold architecture and latent heat evolution during the production of porous biomedical collagen structures using freeze-drying. Collagen scaffolds are used widely in the biomedical industry for the repair and reconstruction of skeletal tissues and organs. Freeze-drying of collagen slurries is a standard industrial process, and, until now, the literature has sought to characterize the influence of set processing parameters including the freezing protocol and weight percentage of collagen. However, we are able to demonstrate, by monitoring the local thermal events within the slurry during solidification, that nucleation, growth and annealing processes can be controlled, and therefore we are able to control the resulting scaffold architecture. Based on our correlation of thermal profile measurements with scaffold architecture, we hypothesize that there is a link between the fundamental freezing of ice and the structure of scaffolds, which suggests that this concept is applicable not only for collagen but also for ceramics and pharmaceuticals. We present a design protocol of strategies for tailoring the ice-templated scaffold structure.http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/11/92/20130958.shortauthors

This paper will discuss applications of an ice slurry generator that has been in production since 1995. The unit is being used in standard ice thermal storage systems and is also being applied in some innovative projects where ice slurry is pumped to heat exchangers. The characteristics and advantages of ice slurry

have been known for several years due to laboratory tests and analysis of past years. Since 1995, the advantages of ice slurry have been demonstrated in real commercial and industrial facilities utilizing the ice slurry generator discussed in this paper.The “ice slurry generator” is a production unit that is being utilized in standard thermal storage applications around the world. Of equal importance is that the unit is being utilized in some innovative projects which pump ice slurry to heat exchangers.http://www.paulmuellercompany.com/ProductDivisions/Ice_Systems_Group/pdfs/isg.pdf