With the world heading towards higher temperatures every year and global warming peaking, Chinese scientists might have found a breather to the menace of climate change. A green refrigeration technology to replace the traditional method of refrigeration that largely uses greenhouse gases.
Scientists at the Institute of Solid-State Physics at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science have found a cooling alternative to freon, largely used for refrigeration across the world, in n-alkanes through solid-liquid state transition driven by high pressure. This new technology could offer an alternative to developing climate-friendly refrigerators to be used in homes, shops, warehouses, among other places.
A paper published in the journal Nature Communications states that the emerging caloric cooling technology provides a green alternative to conventional vapor-compression technology which brings about serious environmental problems. “However, the reported caloric materials are much inferior to their traditional counterparts in cooling capability,” the paper said.
WHAT IS GREEN REFRIGERATION?
The green refrigeration uses caloric cooling technology where the Barocaloric (BC) effect is generated based on the principles of Raman study that reveal that applying pressure to the liquid state suppresses the twisting and random thermal motions of molecular chains. The Barocaloric effect is the heating or cooling of materials under pressure variations.
Researchers found that when the pressure is strong enough to drive the liquid-solid-transition, the configurational entropy will be fully suppressed and induce the colossal Barcaloric effect. While the paper detailed the new technology, it still maintained that problems like high driving pressure and low thermal response remain unsolved, which hinders it practical use as of now.
WHY DO WE NEED GREEN REFRIGERATION?
Refrigeration is widely used in the world, covering fields including food storage, air conditions, industrial manufacture, medical treatment among others. The majority of cooling equipment used in the field depends on conventional refrigeration technologies, which are based on compression cycles of powerful greenhouse gases like hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs).
Researchers say that the demand for cooling will rise in the future because of increases in the population, urbanisation, and improvement in quality of life making it critical to develop new technology that is climate-friendly. “Environmentally harmful refrigerants seem unavoidable in present vapor-compression technologies. Therefore, it is urgent to develop alternative cooling technologies, where the related refrigerants should be clean and environmentally friendly,” the paper said.
Researchers are now looking to explore the technology and enhance the technical challenges to bring it to practical use in the coming years.
