Introduction
Every home and office has a refrigerator. It’s convenient to store foods and drink but its gas(HFC) to make it cool does harm to environment. Besides the gas can not be recycled yet.
There is a good news. Scientists developed another new eco friendly way to refrigerate things without dangerous hydrofluorocarbons. HFCs are potent greenhouse gases that can be 1430 times more than carbon dioxide per unit of mass.
A new way to make fridge, ionocaloric cooling
There’s a new way to lower the temperature of your domestic fridge, due to recent research by scientists. The new methods is called ionocaloric cooling, and the hope is this can make refrigerators more safe and environmental friendly.
The typical way that fridges normally operate is that they transport heat away from a designated space with the help of gases that cools as it expands. The issue of this is that the gases which we use in our refrigeration systems aren’t the most eco-friendly in the world.
This new method however will bring to the forefront a new way to absorb and shed heat energy that’s much more environmentally friendly.
Researchers from Berkeley University in US had developed a new method that takes advantage of the way that energy is stored or released as material changes phase for example in the case of when ice melts and turns to water.
When you raise the temperature of a block of ice, it starts to melt and as a result this melting absorbs heat from the surrounding area, cooling it down in the process.
If you want to force ice to melt without increasing the heat of the surroundings you can do so with a few charged particles of ions. As an example of this we can use the situation where salt is put on roads to prevent the formation of ice.
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/news/berkeley-lab-presents-ionocaloric-cooling-method
Ionocaloric process also utilises salt to changes a fluid’s phase and aid the cooling of its surroundings.
Eco friendly new cooling system without hydrofluorocarbons
Drew Lilley from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is a mechanical engineer said the landscape of refrigerants is an unsolved problem and no one has successfully developed an alternative solution that make stuff cold, works efficiently is safe and doesn’t hurt the environment.
He thinks the ionocaloric cycle has the potential to meet all those goals if realised appropriately. In their work the researchers made the ionocaloric cycle theory to see how it could possibly compete with today’s mainstream everyday refrigeration, and whether it would be an improvement upon what we already have.
They would use a current that would run through the system in order to energise the ions, and in turn change the melting point of the material to adjust the temperature.
Salt made with iodine and sodium was also incorporated into the experiments run by the team, in order to melt ethylene carbonate. The common solvent which is organic in nature is a component used in battery production, and one of its materials in production is carbon dioxide.
This process has the potential to lower global warming significantly.
One single volt of charge from the experiment was found to provide a temperature shift of 24 degrees C, exceeding results of other calorific technologies.
Another mechanical engineer from the same lab, Ravi commented there are three things they’re trying to balance. The GWP(Global Warming Potential) of the refrigerant, energy efficiency, and the cost of the equipment itself. From the first try, the data looks very promising on all three of these aspects.
Current mainstream vapour compression systems used in refrigeration rely very much on gases which are high in global warming potential, in particular many types of hydrofluorocarbons(HFC).
Various countries have signed up to the Kigali Agreement to lower hydrofluorocarbon production and use by 80% over the next 25 years. Scientists are hoping that ionocaloric cooling can be the next big thing, and help achieve eco-friendly targets.
So now the challenge begins for scientists to implement their ideas into practical applications for every day use, which means scaling up the technology without any significant issues or drawbacks.
Ultimately this could also be used for heating systems and not just cooling. Ravi describes what needed to be one next to elevate the system to the next stage.
Closure
The team has the brand new thermodynamic cycle and framework that brings together elements form different fields and showed that it can work. Now it’s time for experimentation to test different combinations of materials and techniques to meet the engineering challenges.
Source: coolingpost
