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.
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.
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.
You don’t overcome thermodynamics, but you can work around them. For example:
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.
Or you can shunt it into space so that it doesn’t heat the atmosphere on its way out. That’s called radiative cooling and it’s brilliant.
And it can be done at home with household items. See Nighthawk’s YT channel for more info: https://youtu.be/N3bJnKmeNJY
And that’s just one out of many possible approaches. Interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_surfaces_(climate_engineering)
That’s reflection of external heat not removal of internal heat. Refrigeration requires effort and therefore energy.
I was talking about cooling and a practical example of “working around the rules”.
As for refrigeration in particular: any similar mechanism can do this too. Example: if you can figure out a material that emits IR in the ballpark for that specific range of wavelengths, you can use it as an active shunt.
Also read somewhere before (not sure when or where tbh, but it might’ve been an old school 2000s forum discussion or something) about a way to possibly achieve it via phase change cooling at a molecular scale iirc. It wasn’t viable at the time and we made light of it, but with the material science advancements of today? Who knows. Maybe someone figured it out.
Published on Nature. 40 € article.
Here’s the news article from the university.
This advancement results from a synergistic combination of materials, heat transfer fluid and refrigeration structures.
Operating at 1Hz, the desktop-scale device achieved a cold-source temperature of -12 ℃ from a room-temperature heat sink (24℃), establishing a temperature lift of 36 ℃. This is the first reported sub-zero Celsius performance in elastocaloric cooling. In a real-world demonstration, the system was integrated into a package measuring 1.0×0.5×0.5m3 and tested outdoors at temperature between 20 and 25℃. It successfully cooled an insulated chamber down to a stable -4℃ air temperature within 60 minutes and froze 20ml of distilled water into ice within 2 hours, validating its real-world freezing capability.
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.
No one’s saying the technology isn’t interesting just at the article is rubbish.
Who wrote that headline anyway, the headline should have been scientists have created sub-zero solid state cooling, but the writer somewhat arbitrarily decided that this was about environmentalism which this has got nothing to do with.
The scientists are not even making the claim that this is a necessarily viable technology, it’s just a thing that they’ve managed to achieve.
I’m surprised the article writer didn’t do the usual thing that science “journalists” tend to do, which is claim that it kills cancer. So we should be thankful for small mercies.
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?
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.
cheaper refrigeration would DEFINITELY help this problem. the big issue with food waste is food spoils so quickly (especially produce and meat), so it makes more sense to toss it than try to find a big enough space that’s REFRIGERATED because the food is usually free, no one wants to spend thousands preserving it. cheaper refrigeration would absolutely improve this scenario.
Refrigeration already is cheap. The problem a lot of places have is not an inability to afford a refrigerator it’s no energy to power the refrigerator. This technology does not into address that problem. In fact it probably worsens it because this technology is less efficient in terms of power consumption.
Also I would love to live in the world where you live because over here food costs money. It isn’t free.
Exactly
But the reason why most of that food is thrown away is not lack of refrigeration, cheaper refrigeration will not solve that problem.
I think “cheaper refrigerators” is an oversimplification. People without access to a functional refrigerator often have bigger problems than a mere absence of a single appliance.
But the energy savings is a big deal. We’re not just talking about food refrigeration but AC, which is a much bigger deal especially as we suffer a warning planet
But the energy savings is a big deal.
I agree, but that has little to do with food waste.
Moreover, I doubt this is more efficient than traditional refrigeration. But I’d be happy to be wrong on this.
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?
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.
Some sources claim much higher efficiency. This makes sense to me since you are not limited by your coolant’s properties so much and don’t have to maintain pressure. But I can’t do in depth research for you.
What sources?
The article doesn’t list any. All it says is they reached a cooling temperature of -12°C, but has no information on the energy used to achieve that.
Google “elastocaloric heat pump efficiency” thats the technical term.
I’m asking what saurce you have that says that they are more efficient than refrigeration systems because everything I find says the opposite.
Removed by mod
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.
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?
Cool.
TL;Dr but the gif looks really cool
