What amount of refrigeration does a day ton of refrigeration equal?

A day ton of refrigeration is defined as the amount of heat absorbed by melting 1 ton of ice at 32°F in a 24-hour period. This unit of measurement is based on the amount of energy required to change the state of water from ice to liquid at the freezing point while maintaining the temperature.

Specifically, the latent heat of fusion of ice is approximately 144 BTUs per pound. Since there are 2,000 pounds in a ton, the total energy required to melt 1 ton of ice is about 288,000 BTUs over a 24-hour period, which equals 12,000 BTUs per hour. This principle is foundational to refrigeration and air conditioning systems, where the aim is to remove heat from a designated area, functioning similarly to the melting ice absorbing heat from its surroundings.

The other options describe different thermal processes. For instance, cooling a ton of water by 1°F or heating water by 10°F involves sensible heat changes rather than phase changes, which have different energy requirements. Drying clothes in a dryer involves latent heat removal but in a vastly different context than melting ice, hence, they do not directly correspond to the definition of a day ton refrigeration.