Carl Munters, the inventor who gave his name to the Munters’ brand, has been honoured by ASHRAE for making milestone contributions to the growth of air conditioning, heating, refrigeration and ventilation. Individuals
like Carl Munters who are inducted into the ‘Pioneers of the Industry’ classification, have shown evidence of distinction, either technically or academically.
Carl Georg Munters, born in Sweden in 1897, created his first patent n 1918 – a starting crank that did not kick back for combustion engines. After graduating from the Royal Institute of Technology in 1922, Carl’s patent application relating to the household refrigerator was filed. This application, known as the ‘Platen-Munters’ refrigerator design, had no moving parts and used the absorption princile with ammonia as a cooling agent. The creation of the refrigerator was aimed at residential use and would allow a small gas flame at one end while allowing ice to be produced at the other.
Carl, through collaboration with John Tandberg, also developed foam plastic (known by the Dow Chemical trademark as Styrofoam). Foam plastic was made to expand by introducing soluble gas under pressure into the melted substance. When the pressure was quickly lowered, the substance bubbled and hardened into a highly porous structure that turned out to have excellent insulating properties.
In 1953, Carl and his associates made their big breakthrough in developing efficient heat and mass transfer surfaces. They developed structures using thin, tightly bound corrugated sheets that provided enormously higher efficiency in a heat transfer device of any given size. The new structures were dramatically smaller. Carl and his colleagues immediately started to pursue innovative uses for these structures such as compact heat exchangers, cooling towers, dehumidifiers, humidifiers, and heat recovery units. Today, these inventions are known as heat recovery wheels, evaporative air cooling, and humidification media. One year later, his team started to develop a compact but highly efficient fill for cooling towers.
The inventions of Carl Munters have evolved into the core technologies of energy efficient, sustainable HVAC equipment and are still finding new markets today. During his lifetime, Carl Munters was granted more than 1,000 patents and most of his inventions are still being used today.
“We are proud of our heritage and the legacy that Carl Munters has left us and the impact he has had on various industries. Innovation is key and we are at the fore front offering the latest evaporative cooling technologies for data centres, investing heavily in R&D,” commented Munters’ EMEA Data Centre sales manager, Simon Young, adding: “Munters products are pushing the cooling boundaries by offering not only an energy efficient system using the latest efficient fan and heat exchanger technologies, but also one that can be scalable and optimised for various building designs. These can include single or multi-storey facilities with various deployments – such as perimeter, rooftop and gantry.”
