Refrigeration – Cooled enclosure – Portable receptacle
Reissue Patent
1995-12-21
2001-06-12
Doerrler, William (Department: 3744)
Refrigeration
Cooled enclosure
Portable receptacle
C062S530000
Reissue Patent
active
RE037213
ABSTRACT:
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Background of the Invention
Field of Invention
Description of the Invention
Summary of the Invention
Brief Description of the Drawings
Reference Numerals in Drawings
Description of the Preferred Embodiments
Claims
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to a holding container equipped with an inner container surrounded by a layer of thermally treated material for the purpose of inducing and maintaining a desired thermal condition of the contents placed within the inner container.
2. Description of the Prior Art
It is generally held as desirable to consume beverages such as beer, soft drinks, and fruit juices, when they are cold. Placing ice cubes in the drink is the common way of doing this. While reasonably effective for keeping the drink cook, the melting ice causes the drink to lose carbonation, and become watery, destroying the quality of the beverage.
Preparing and serving ice cubes is messy, and bothersome, and backlog of them takes up valuable freezer space. Though automatic ice cube makers reduce some of the hassle of preparing ice, they are very expensive, and require special installation and routine servicing. Ice made in automatic ice cube makers, can become contaminated with chemical and mineral impurities that accumulate in the water supply lines. In addition to imparting a foul taste, these contaminants are capable of causing severe illness in persons that consume beverages containing contaminated ice. As indicated in the instruction manuals that come with automatic ice makers, routine servicing must be done in order to avoid this very unpleasant possibility. In addition to this extra inconvenience, the knowledge that increasing amounts of pollutants are accumulating in one's supply of beverage ice cannot be said to add one's drinking pleasure!
Another disadvantage of ice is that it absorbs odors from other foods stored in the freezer. These odors also imparting a foul taste to the ice and hence, the beverage in which they are used. This often results in the need to discard the ice, which is wasteful of water, energy, and one's time.
The quantity of ice commonly used during beverage consumption is far more than is actually needed to cool the drink. The usual practice of discarding ice after the drink is finished, wastes perhaps as much water and energy as is used in the drink itself. Though this quantity seems small on a unit basis, it is the way in which over 300 million beverage are consumed each day in the U.S. alone!
Though ice cubes are inconvenient, messy, destructive to the beverage quality, wasteful of water and energy resources, they prevail as the dominant way of cooling beverages during their consumption.
The aim of the prior art has been to produce a drinking tumbler or similar device, that is equipped with its own refrigerant, that cools the beverage, without the use of ice, with the promise of greater convenience, and improved beverage quality. In spite of these alleged advantages over the conventional ice cube method, many factors have hampered widespread success of beverage coolers of the prior art. Bulk, expense, unattractiveness, discomfort in use, short product life, along with poor cooling performance, have weighted heavily against the commercial success of these devices.
The basic design of these beverage cooling devices has changed very little in the 60 years since their introduction by Mock, U.S. Pat. No. 1,771,186 (1928). An inner container, or “cup”, holds the drink while it is being consumed. The inner container is enclosed within a larger outer container. The compartment between the containers, is filled with a water based refrigerant, and hermetically sealed. The beverage is cooled, as heat is absorbed by the refrigerant, through the walls of the inner container. The refrigerant, usually a plastic “gel”, or water solution containing propylene glycol, alcohol, or various minerals salts, is frozen by placing the beverage cooler into the freezer compartment of a refrigerator.
When frozen, the refrigerant, being mostly water, gains about 10% in additional volume. Because of this extra volume, the compartment holding the refrigerant is filled to only 75% to 90% of its capacity, as rupture of the walls results from freezing one that is completely full. The remaining 10% to 25% of the compartment, contains a void or air space, often referred to as an “expansion air space”. This expansion air space is intended to allow a place for the expansion volume of the refrigerant.
The position of this “expansion air space” within the compartment holding the refrigerant, is critical to the operation of several prior art beverage coolers. The designs of Mock, U.S. Pat. No. 1,771,186 (1928), Stoner, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,205,677, 3,205,678 (1965) and 3,302,428 (1967) and Paquin, U.S. Pat. No. 3,360,957 (1968), and others, required the unit to be placed upside down when frozen in the refrigerator freezer. Failure to invert the unit reduces cooling performance as the frozen mass of refrigerant is inclined to slide out of contact with the inner container as the refrigerant begins to melt, disconnecting the refrigerant from thermal contact with the beverage. Another reason is that freezing the unit in the upright position places the expansion air space in the upper portion of the compartment, depriving the more important upper portion of the beverage of refrigerant for cooling. This condition gets progressively worse as the refrigerant melts. The melted refrigerant, having a smaller volume than when frozen, settles to the bottom of the compartment, leaving the upper portion of the inner container out of contact with the refrigerant. The upper portion of the beverage is at more of a disadvantage than any other region of the beverage, having the lowest amount of contact area with the refrigerant, and the greatest amount of exposure to heat from the environment. The temperature of the beverage in this area rises rapidly, once the refrigerant loses contact with the adjoining wall of the inner container.
The condition just described, is further worsened when the upper portion of the inner container is tapered outward, a common practice of the prior art. The taper reduces the volume of the upper region of the compartment, and hence the amount of refrigerant available for cooling that portion of the beverage. Because the volume of this area is so much less by comparison to the bottom region, a loss of just 10% in the volume of the refrigerant may cause a third or more of the upper portion of the inner container to be uncovered! The taper provides still more disadvantages, by enlarging the opening of the inner container. This exposes an even greater amount of the beverage to heat contamination from the environment than the straight sided inner container described earlier, while exaggerating the loss of refrigerant available to this area. A beverage cooler of this configuration would be very difficult, if not impossible to maintain at a consistant temperature throughout.
Another reason prior art beverage coolers are frozen upside down is to position the expansion air space between the bottoms of the inner and outer containers. This is done to prevent fracture and bowing of the bottoms when the refrigerant expands. If the unit is placed right side up in the refrigerant freezer, the refrigerant immediately fills the space between the bottoms of the containers. This puts the expansion air space at the other end of the compartment, depriving the area between the bottom of the containers of space for the extra volume of refrigerant to expand. The result, if not a wall fracture, is an excessive amount of bowing of the bottom of the container, to the extent of causing the unit to stand lopsided. Moore et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,163,374 (1979), observed these forces to be sufficient to cause the retaining ring, that held his entire unit together, to disengage from the outer container to which it was attached. This occurred in spite of high elasticity of both the styrofoam outer container, and the flexible
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