A team of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley Lab have developed a new method of heating and cooling known as ionocaloric cooling, which they believe could someday replace current vapor compression methods.
According to a Berkeley Lab news release, the results of the study were published in the journal Science and researchers were able to demonstrate the technique in experiments using ethylene carbonate, a typical organic solvent found in lithium-ion batteries, and a salt consisting of sodium and iodine.
“Researchers at our Lab have developed a new kind of heating and cooling method – one that they hope will someday help phase out refrigerants that contribute to global warming,” Berkeley Lab said in a post on Twitter.
“The landscape of refrigerants is an unsolved problem: No one has successfully developed an alternative solution that makes stuff cold, works efficiently, is safe and doesn’t hurt the environment,” Drew Lilley, a graduate research assistant at Berkeley Lab and a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, who led the study, said in the news release. “We think the ionocaloric cycle has the potential to meet all those goals if realized appropriately.”
The researchers also hope to solve the issue of refrigerants, with no successful alternative to cool items that is efficient, safe and environmentally friendly, the release reported.
“There’s potential to have refrigerants that are not just GWP [global warming potential]-zero, but GWP-negative,” Lilly added in the news release. “Using a material like ethylene carbonate could actually be carbon-negative, because you produce it by using carbon dioxide as an input. This could give us a place to use CO2 from carbon capture.”
Ravi Prasher, a corresponding author and research affiliate in Berkeley Lab’s Energy Technologies Area and adjunct professor in mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley, noted there are three things that researchers hope to work out: energy efficiency, the GWP of the refrigerant and the cost of the equipment, according to the release. He said the data looks promising.
“We have this brand-new thermodynamic cycle and framework that brings together elements from different fields, and we’ve shown that it can work,” Prasher said in the release. “Now, it’s time for experimentation to test different combinations of materials and techniques to meet the engineering challenges.”
"We'll spare you the obvious puns — this is just a very exciting piece of research," Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in a Twitter post.
