Oak Ridge boffins twist exotic metal into eco-friendly, solid-state cooler The US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has been investigating exotic materials in pursuit of solid-state cooling devices without needing refrigerants or moving parts. The findings, published in the journal Science Advances, hold out the promise of enhancing materials to enable more environmentally …
Solid stae cooling? Peltier effect. Used it more than 50 years ago in a freezing microtome*.
* A microtome is laboratory equipment to cut thin sections of a specimen for microscopy. The specimen might need support to stop it collapsing. For small fragments of wood ice is a suitable support.
It was all the rage back when watercooling came out. Watercooling won because the Peltier coolers had a tendancy to freeze not on ly the CPU, but the air around it, meaning ice crystals forming on the motherboard.
Not good.
Cue a slew of tutorials explaining how to spread vaseline around the CPU to avoid shorting the motherboard.
Yeah, watercooling was easier.
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The freezing microtome stage used water to remove the heat from the warm side. Any refrigerating system is simply a means of transferring heat from one place to another so the heat has to be removed somehow, even if it's just be air cooling. It's not at all clear from the article how this Oak Ridge method does that. From TFA it seems to be just a heat sponge that's going to have to be wrung out somewhere and with no moving parts it sounds as if it that would be the same place it got it from in which case the cooling would only be temporary heat removal.
Well if this is to be useful it actually needs to pump heat, not just absorb it and then almost immediately return it to wherever it came from.
That's where fluids win big time, and even though Peltier devices aren't incredibly efficient they do have a hot side and a cold side.
So how is the transfer going to take place, and what will be the likely transfer efficiency?
Well if this is to be useful it actually needs to pump heat, not just absorb it and then almost immediately return it to wherever it came from.
....
So how is the transfer going to take place, and what will be the likely transfer efficiency?
I would guess that carefully tailored (narrow and intense?) magnetic fields which are repeatedly steered through such a material could move heat absorbed into the material from one side to the opposite side where it might be shed by conduction and convection. (A little like peristalsis.)
The image I have is a Carnot cycle with a mixture of phonons and magnons as the working fluid. :)
The hope, I suppose, is that this research will lead to new, cheaper materials that could make inexpensive, efficiently and reliable solid state refrigeration more widely available especially in regions where photovoltaic+battery are the only practical options.
The H2-NH3 absorption refrigeration cycle (eg Platen-Munters) run directly from solar heat or indirectly from solar electricity (PV) seemed at one time to be a viable alternative but apparently hasn't materialized.
Quite a magnetic moment to chill around such synchronized dance moves of mesmerizing solid-state cool by those localized hybrid magnon-phonon couples doing the frustrated spin-wave heat-sponge tango! Great shapes, swell memories, and no need for a shrink yet (it seems)!
The eco-friendly bit appears to come from El Reg, rather than the paper linked to in TFA. And even the article seems a bit confused, as the sentence
> environmentally friendly ways of cooling things, from food to vehicles to electronics, with a quiet, compact and lightweight system that allows precise temperature control.
seems to me to be referring to "friendly to the operating environment" - i.e. it won't keep the staff awake with its racket - rather than to The Environment (note capitals).
I suspect there is some element of avoiding the often quite environmentally nasty chemicals used for refrigeration and also the maintenance required for them. For example, even closed loop water coolers need maintenance at some point and the chemicals that are added to the water to slow leakage, condensation, desaturation and likely a few other process terms that I've forgotten are probably not good for the environment either. Add in the weight and extra components required and the environmental load increases.
So in balance, avoiding these is a good thing as long as they are used for a long enough time compared to the environmental cost of manufacture and eventual breakdown.
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