United States. Scientists from the CaloriCool research consortium are closer than ever to the materials needed for a new type of cooling technology that is markedly more energy efficient than current gas compression systems.
Currently, residential and commercial refrigeration consumes about one in every five kilowatt-hours of electricity generated in the U.S., but a caloric cooling system could save up to 30 percent in energy use.
Consortium members have filed a pair of provisional patent applications on two caloric materials, which are compounds that generate strong cooling effects when affected by magnetic, electrical or mechanical forces. One of the materials has a magnetocaloric effect 50 percent better than any previously known material of this class. The second patentable discovery corrects a defect in an already known material, which was previously thought to be too fragile to use outside the laboratory environment.
"Both materials are composed of common elements, which means they will be reasonably economical to mass manufacture," said Vitalij Pecharsky, a scientist at the Ames Laboratory and director of CaloriCool. "It's a major hurdle to overcome for the adoption of this technology in appliances and HVAC systems."
The ultimate goal of CaloriCool is to transfer solid-state cooling system technology to the market for use in commercially available refrigeration devices and systems.
CaloriCool was established as part of the Energy Materials Network and is sponsored by DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy through its Office of Advanced Manufacturing, and headed by the Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University.
Source: https://phys.org
