Imaging if this technology could cool a data centre.
Edit: I was not involved in this project. You are wasting your time asking me questions.
Cool, but I’m always a bit dubious by these statements.
Refrigerating just 12% of the produce that goes to waste every year due to spoilage would feed an estimated 1 billion more people.
I mean, I know cooling is important and making the process more efficient will make things better. But the reason why most of that food is thrown away is not lack of refrigeration, cheaper refrigeration will not solve that problem.
That’s thermodynamically impossible but ok.
When you cool something you take heat energy out of it you have to do something with that heat energy you can’t just delete it.
Seriously this! I feel like that cobra chicken meme where I’m yelling
“where does the entropy go?”
“WHERE DOES THE ENTROPY GO‽”
Entropy isn’t about conservation of energy
You can down vote me all you want, it doesn’t change the facts.
Heat is literally entropy.
The link says ‘zero-emissions-cooling’
The article sez: “It relies on the temperature change of materials called shape memory alloys (SMAs) when they are stretched and released.”
How do you stretch something without producing any emissions?
Oh geeze, it’s that rubber band refrigerator that (I think) Tech Connections demoed?
You can’t. It’s a different kind of heat pump.
If it is more efficient than vacuum-compression it’s good.
Most refrigerants are extremely toxic and extreme green house gasses. But there are safer alternatives, eg. CO2.
I don’t think shape change materials are all that efficient. The problem being is you still need some mechanism to compress the material again, which obviously uses energy. As you say their main advantage is that they don’t use traditional refrigerants. But the trade-off for that is that they are mechanically more complicated and probably for any given amount of cooling will require more electricity.
You can trade those off with renewable energy sources of course so it may still be worth it but technically they are worse efficiency than traditional vacuum pumps.
Elastocaloric coolers are not new. There are even some versions that you can buy right now, they usually for niche industrial use and have their own set of problems, namely that they’re not remotely as efficient as vapor compression so it costs more and moves less heat.
The breakthrough here was discovering a different alloy that allows sub-zero temperatures. It doesn’t change the efficiency which is the primary barrier to adoption.
Wait, they are talking about a new type of peltier device?
Jesus Christ, whoever wrote this “article” has no idea what they’re talking about. The researchers achieved sub-zero temperatures with a solid refrigerant, which is impressive. It has however absolutely nothing to do with climate change, because the heat still has to go somewhere. And the point that gas refrigerants are horrible greenhouse gases is not generally true anymore. Most new systems use gases as refrigerants that have equal or less impact on the atmosphere than co2 if they’re released into the atmosphere. And that only happens if the loop is damaged, under normal operation it should stay sealed.
Under normal operation, in a perfect system it will stay sealed. Problems come at end of life and in real world use. Seals aren’t perfect, gas escapes slowly. Some seals are bad, a blast chiller at my work needs regassing every other year. People dump old fridges and freezers on the street and they get damaged.
It all gets out eventually.
But past cooling devices have not had enough cooling power for commercial use. The HKUST team developed a device that uses a new type of solid refrigerant, a nickel-titanium alloy with a higher nickel ratio. They also use calcium chloride as the working fluid that transfers heat away for cooling. Their design connects multiple alloy tubes together for a cascading effect that amplifies cooling.
In outdoor tests, the desktop device cools a surface down from 24°C to -12°C, and froze water in two hours. Sun Qingping, the mechanical and aerospace engineering professor who led the work, said in a press release that the researchers plan to increase the system’s efficiency and make it more cost-effectiveness by using advanced shape memory alloy materials and trying different system designs.
Cool.
Er, so to speak.
Finally, someone else in this thread that sees the potential.
So multiple, nickel-titanium alloy tubes, are stretched and released within the refrigerator, causing a temperature change in the alloy, the heat of which (pulled from the interior) transferred to the calcium chloride fluid, being pumped around through the tubes; to be transferred to the outdoor climate, by use of an exterior heat exchanger. Something along those lines?
First law of thermodynamics…
Maxwell’s field equations
Markov chains
Science words
Maybe cool the planet with it.
easy, just cause 1 or more supervolcanoes to erupt. or a large asteroid throwing dust into the air.
TL;Dr but the gif looks really cool
Cool.
