What do you call a piece of equipment in which the entire refrigeration cycle occurs?

The correct answer is a chiller. A chiller is an essential piece of equipment used in various applications to remove heat from a liquid, which can then be circulated through a heat exchange system to cool equipment or provide air conditioning.

The refrigeration cycle within a chiller encompasses several stages: the refrigerant absorbs heat from the liquid being cooled, evaporates into a gas, gets compressed by the compressor, and then dissipates the heat at a condenser before cycling back. This entire process makes the chiller a comprehensive system responsible for achieving and maintaining the desired cooling effect.

In comparison, while a refrigerator also carries out the refrigeration cycle, it is typically designed for smaller-scale applications, like food preservation, and therefore does not serve the broader industrial or commercial purposes that chillers do. A compressor is merely one component of the refrigeration cycle, responsible for compressing the refrigerant, and a heat exchanger is a device used to transfer heat between two or more fluids but does not encompass the entire cycle by itself. Thus, the chiller is the correct designation for the equipment where the whole refrigeration cycle takes place.