Say hello to ionocaloric cooling, a new technology for reducing mercury that could eventually replace existing techniques, a study published in Science has revealed.
Conventional refrigeration systems use a gas that is cooled over a long distance to remove heat from an area. Despite the efficiency of this method, some of the preferred gases we use have a negative impact on the environment.
However, there are several ways to force a substance to absorb and release heat energy.
A new technique developed by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US uses a method to store or release energy when a substance changes, such as when solid ice turns into liquid water. .
If you raise the temperature of an ice cube, it will melt. The fact that melting cools its atmosphere by absorbing heat from its surroundings may not be so obvious to us.
Adding a few charged particles, or ions, to ice can help it melt without the need for extra heat. A common example of this in action is the use of salt on roads to prevent ice from forming. In the ionocaloric cycle, salt is also used to change the phase of the fluid and cool its surroundings.
“There is an unsolved problem in the refrigerants landscape,” said Drew Lilly, a mechanical engineer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, Science Alert said. “No one has successfully developed an alternative solution that cools things, works efficiently, is safe, and doesn’t harm the environment.”
“We think the ionocaloric cycle has the potential to meet all of these goals if realized properly.”
The ionocaloric cycle theory was modeled by researchers to show how it could compete with or even outperform existing refrigerants in terms of efficiency. The ions in the system will be moved by the current flowing through it, changing the melting point of the material, as will the temperature.
Scientists also conducted tests to dissolve ethylene carbonate using salt containing sodium and iodine. It is made using the common organic solvent carbon dioxide as an input and is also used in lithium-ion batteries. This could result in the system simply having a negative global warming potential instead of zero.
The experiment used less than a volt of charge, which produced a temperature change of 25 degrees Celsius (45 degrees Fahrenheit), far beyond what previous caloric technologies have been able to achieve.
“There are three things we’re trying to balance: the GWP of the refrigerant, the energy efficiency, and the cost of the equipment itself,” remarked Ravi Prasher, a mechanical engineer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Engineer Ravi Prashar added that the first attempt was promising. Data
Currently, high GWP gases such as various hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) are used in vapor compression systems. Ionocaloric cooling can play an important role in countries that have signed the Kigali Amendment commitment to reduce the production and use of HFCs by at least 80% over the next 25 years.
Now, scientists must move the technology from the lab to real-world platforms for consumer commercialization and scale-up without problems. These systems can eventually be used for both cooling and heating.
