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Matt you say nothing can liberate us but Dipole Electron Flood Theory just might create free portable clean safe electricity in a lunchbox. The Theory.... We used light and created sterile muons and electron showers. Anatomy of the Proton. Dipole Electron Flood Theory is a new Atomic model that changes the nucleus from a completely positive into a dipole made of tiny dipoles called Dirac Neutrinos instead of a large positive-only core. Protons and Neutrons are made of dipoles in certain stable quantities that we now call atoms in various sizes.
Dipole Electron Flood theory states the proton is made of about 1839 Dipoles and Neutrons about 1840....If Electrons are dipoles (and I prove they are experimentally) it changes everything. Can we talk?
Small comment from someone who did research in elastocalorics on NiTi alloys: martensite doesnt turn to austenite under stress. Martensite is a twinned configuration in NiTi, and deforming it, de-twins it. The detwinned martensite is turning to austenite when heated up and back to twinned martensite when cooling down without mechanical load. Also superelasticity with NiTi refers to an austenitic alloy turning directly into detwinned martensite under mechanical load and back to its original shape (which is saved in the auatenitic state) when taking away the stress. This way, up to 8 or 10% of seemingly elastic deformation is possible. In comparison, steel can only exhibit around 0.1% elastic deformation. Happy to explain more or answer other questions. Regards from Germany ✌️
@@McReinsenHi! I'm doing my PhD on improving fatigue life of elastocaloric alloys (copper based ones) NiTi alloys can go up to 100 000 cycles even 1million in a recent study but the stress is lower for an elastocaloric application. My alloy CuZnAl last 10 000cycles for now and the target for an industrial applications in about 10 million cycles so there's work to do but we're on the good way
Out of curiousity why are we not seeing more interest in it for artificial muscle? It feels like a natural substitute for artificial limbs... Is it a longevity, cost or sone other factor?
Having worked with nitinol, I had to learn the fatigue properties. With constant amplitude deformation, it is considered to have infinite life. It's supposed to be better than Ti64, which we actually tested one time to 40 billion cycles @ 300 MPa before we got sick of testing and started cutting grooves in the sample to force it to fail. It really was a fun trick to hold a thick wire or small bar of nitinol to your lower lip and bend/unbend it. The change in temperature is pretty shocking. As a cheap alternative, you can do the same with a fat rubber band, stretching/unstretching it. Because you can stretch it more, you also get a dramatic change in temperature.
@@roboticdem0n it comes down to latent heat which is the amount of cooling energy that can be harnessed from one mechanical cycle. Binary NiTi alloys can get up to 20-30 Joules of energy per gram of material, but this is for full transformation of the material without considering fatigue and therefore lifetime. Improved alloys with more alloying elements can be more stable while providing an optimized energy conversion. It's still a basic research topic, so hard to say what an actual functioning machine might look like and how it would perform. I've personally seen COP of around 14-18 in full transformation (thermal energy harnessed divided by mechanical energy spent). I'm guessing COP of around 5-10 could be realistic, which is 2-3x than what can be achieved with a gas compression cycle. So 2-3x more efficient and therefore cheaper.
@@McReinsen yea but how big would it need to be to cool lets say a house of 240m² or 2600ft² because a "brick" the size of a car on the side of your house is not practical
@@McReinsen isn't the main issue moving it from where you want to be cool to where you want to be warm? Liquids are easy, but moving something solid is more of a challenge I can imagine.
I remember as a kid noticing that rubber bands got hot when you stretch them and cold when they relax. I saw a crazy project someone built that put masses of rubber bands on a rotating rack that constantly stretched and released them while blowing air across them. It did manage to cool & heat air but wasn't what you'd call efficient.
You can also simply take a thick-ish rubber band and stretch it, hold it against your skin and you can feel the heat. Keep it stretched and blow room temperature air against the rubber band for a minute and then suddenly release the tension - hold again against your skin and the rubber band feels ice cold.
Unless rubber bands have the same property as these elastometrics- that they cool down further when de-stressed than they heat up when under stress- then they’re not only inefficient, they’re not really doing any cooling at all. The big rubber band machine would just be cooling by 5 degrees and then heating by 5 degrees, and then cooling by 5 degrees and then heating by 5 degrees….
I assume it's for the algorithm, but does every title have to be "How [x] will change/revolutionize *every*thing"? Can't it be a less sensational, more descriptive title?
@@ArtyMars Fair enough. I clicked through anyway this time, but I'm less likely to in the future. The same happened to SilverCymbal and his sensational titles--I stopped watching his videos--but I'm in the minority and won't move the engagement needle. Let the sensational titles continue. "This one easy trick will change your life!"
@@ArtyMars are they dummies if they don't want to hear about some pie in the sky "innovation" that ends up leading to nothing? Rather use those 5 minutes to actually do something productive.
@@Sismodium Hard to guess at fatigue life but nearly all other metals simply heated to liquid state and allowed to reform their crystalline structure will renew any depleted elasticity. So should be straightforward to recycle.
I was watching one of those RUclips channels where a couple is building their dream home and I ran across a technology I hadn't seen before. It's just another take on solar heating, but it seems more advanced. They use evacuated glass tubes. Basically, it's like setting a clear thermos in the sun, or having a well insulated greenhouse. I hadn't seen them before so if you covered them I missed it (or my brain just has too many things in it and is starting to leak). The couple had a big enough array that they needed a pool to dump waste heat into to keep them from overheating when they weren't needed. A while back I saw that they are starting to get aerogels that are clear enough and that don't degrade in sunlight, to start insulating between window panes. There is at least one commercial company selling them. That, if they don't discolor and are as durable as they claim, could be a holy grail for construction, making windows as thermally tight as walls. I've seen a couple other small techs... there is a type of manufactured board... super simple, where two 2x4s are put at right angles and connected with dowels. This limits the thermal bridging to just the dowel spots. You put insulation in between them. They don't require any special construction techniques. Someone used to using 2x4s can switch to using them no problem. Not worth an episode on their own, but maybe an episode where you covered a bunch of the less glamorous, lower cost, smaller breakthroughs?
@@nickwinn7812 I’ve got a pair of panels on top of my greenhouse that were scavenged from a 1980s/1990s project for heating water for cleaning locomotives and railcars. There are a few variations on a theme with the tube arrays, from the basic glycol or water circulating directly inside the tube, with a copper pipe pushing the fluid to the bottom of the tube and it’s extracted out the top, to versions that have a sealed phase-change material inside the tube to move the heat around. Which brings me to another product I saw being pitched for mid to low latitudes where you have a high temperature delta from day to night… insulation/thermal mass pouches with a phase-change gell in them that absorbs the temperature variance and aims to keep balanced temperatures inside the dwelling, which I found very interesting. I suspect something like that would not perform very well in places where it gets in negative temperatures and stays there, but as a retrofit to wooden or steel skinned structures in teh desert it might have potential for passive heating/cooling cycles.
once 8 years ago saw a youtuber built a small hand crank rubber band refrigerator for cooling I have wondered about this kind of thing ever since then.
@@grekiki And lets not forget ... cost! It does not matter how good your tech is, if the cost is even a few percentage higher then a industry established process, you tend to fail in gaining market share. People underestimate at how thin the margins are in some industries. A few percentage more expensive at the source, can be 50% or more, at the customer. This is why so many other, better techs, simply never gotten commercialized (or not mass commercialized) because the market does not support it. I mean, look at basic EVs, ... Tesla did not invest them, EVs have existed for 100+ years. And even today, EVs are extreme heavy, and costly, compared to the same combusting engine tech. With range penalties ... Everybody is looking at the magic battery, and yet, same issue, there are better batteries but cost/weight/safety... And then we have the smart approach like BYD does, with their 1100km cars, hybrid! ICE for power delivery, with the rest "EV". And that range is not fake... Sometimes you need to combine tech, to get the best advantage. Maybe metal combined with airco technology is a better solution? Who knows but right now, its just another one of those "future" techs that we will probably never see in this talked about market (maybe in other markets, sure).
@@benjiro8793 There has to be some other qualities or improvement to the process to give some incentive for the customer. If those technologies are similar in performance with one being high priced,market will not respond for environmental reasonings. But if you add something in terms of performance or quality then market will respond despite being expensive.
Without knowing more about the specifics of the options, that 'really small" space that includes 'a can or bottle of a softdrink' really isn't necessarily a negative. There is a fairly huge need in the medical community for small refrigerators that have about that much space in them. Think insulin pens for diabetics, and other medicine that should be refrigerated for best results, yet you may want close at hand in the bedroom or at the office. An option for that is Peltier coolers, but after watching the Technology Connections episode on those, and keeping in mind the fairly high power requirements for them, I'm not sure that's a useful solution. Among their problems includes the fact that they really only provide about a 40F, or 21c temperature difference across the peltier chip, which means that if the outside temp of the refrigerator is over 100F to begin with, you're only "cooling" the contents to 60 F, which may not be sufficient. You might be able to do better by adding a second cooling stage, but that adds complexity, which may not be a good thing. The problem I see with the elastocaloric refrigerator would be that it may not require a fluid to transfer, but I'd be concerned about the noise involved. That is going to depend on how the system 'works' for doing the heat transfer through the material, but so0 far I don't see enough information. Perhaps my concerns are for naught, but when I think of something that does thermal transfer through changing the shape of a material, I have to imagine that there are going to be mechanical noises involved. More so if you have to move fluids around as well. Then again, this is one of the first times I've even heard of the concept. IDK.
I agree with your opening opinion of, basically, there is no one silver bullet. I realize just because one resolution may not be ideal for my circumstances/location, doesn’t mean it is a waste. If we are to meet the ever growing demand for energy, we need to embrace the idea we will need multiple sources and different ways to best use the energy for the given application.
Metal fatigue is a deal breaker in many applications. A refrigerator built in 1970 will still be working just fine because refrigerants do not fatigue. The thing will weigh more than you can imagine and the original natural rubber gasket will be dry or rotten but it will still be working just fine. Of course they realized they lasted too long.
I hear you, but that same refrigerator has plenty of moving parts that did not fatigue. Parts fail commonly bcause they are engineered for minimum cost with a minimum life. 60 years ago people built virtual-tanks out of everything because profit was so dominating.
I had the same thought. Just stretch a rubber band and you know it changes temperature, but try doing it 1000 times. I could imagine having small panels that you can replace after failure and vary their workload to spread out the failure rate, so in 10 years when the refrigeration has deteriorated, you can replace the first broken panel, and then it would be a regular maintenance activity after that. But yeah, definitely an issue.
The channel Applied Science actually built an elastic band refrigerator that I believe uses this effect. It didnt do much in the way of cooling, but it does a good job of showing the principles.
With the right kind of design with ceramics, you could create an oscillating micromotor with piezo-electric crystals providing the physical stresses and thermocouples providing an electromagnetic charge to pump into the crystals to release the stress, cooling down the material, and creating another charge when the temperature gets hot again; you can make a micro-heat-pump as a painted on layer on a microchip. Cool.
Thus creating a microchip with it's own integarted cooling system if a Nitinol structure was somehow added. It would maybe not avoid the need for extra cooling, but it could reduce a lot of it and eventually reduce the energy consumption in data centres.
Since it's ultimately an electromechanical device, I would like to see a COP comparison for equal capacity between this and a Peltier based system. I think that would be a good illustration of efficiencies.
I think this phenomenon is used in the elastic band refrigerator that the channel Applied Science actually constructed. Although it didn't cool much, it does a nice job of illustrating the concepts.
Am I the only one confused about how you are meant to efficiently remove heat from the elastomer? Your cooler needs to turn into a radiator once per cycle, that means that you need to somehow switch whatever you are cooling with whatever medium you are dumping heat into constantly. I really don't see a use for this over traditional refrigerant based heat pumps outside of very niche applications.
You're not the only one. Short of physically moving the elastomer from one medium to another the only thing I can think of would be something like dual peltier elements but that's going to consume way more energy. How you could physically move the wires between refrigerents without having a nightmare of leaking valves I don't know. I'm glad smarter minds than mine are working on it!
I presume they will have heat transfer fluids, such as water or air circulating over the NiTi as it cools, and the water will cycle to each NiTi element for each cooling stress cycle. They can t be moving the solid into and out of the room for each stress / heat cycle.
Some designs I've observed use a pulley system that draws the elastic material through a loop; the pulleys spin at different speeds, arranged in such a way that the material stretches in some parts of the loop and relaxes in others.
This is exactly the major problem of solid state caloric cooling and heating devices. All their promises fail when they get to this problem. Most researchers talk about their expected efficiency leaving this problem aside (good to get funding). This is why the efforts in different room temperature caloric cooling systems never reached the market so far.
This video about elastocalorics is one of the best explanatory videos I have seen so far. We are extremely pleased that mateligent and iMSL were able to contribute video material. If you’re interested in diving deeper into the technology, patents, state of the art, and industrialization, we look forward to hearing from you.
I've been adding heat pumps to my lesser used rooms for the last couple years. They have been the best option for my needs, but an elastomeric system where I don't have to worry about freezing my hands off when refrigerant is needed, win.
A couple of in-use refrigerants have essentially no atmospheric damage potential (but do have their own problems). Ammonia is toxic if it releases, but is highly efficient, used in large commercial plants and small off-grid refrigerators. Propane is flammable if released, but is clean and highly efficient. It’s currently limited to 150 gram systems in US, though is available in larger systems in Europe. Improved safety/system venting will probably make it a viable replacement for HFC’s at the residential level.
Phase change material research has been one of the energy efficiency industry's holy grails for a fair amount of time (kind of like fusion research) - I have seen a number of periods of increased enthusiasm followed by an inevitable fade. If these newer? materials and their application are finally going to reach commercial viability in the foreseeable future that would be great.
CO2 is replacing HFCs especially in large refrigerators. CO2 taken from the atmosphere. 'the real key for cooling and heating of homes is passive home construction, maybe low cost aerogels in the future.
Looks like this "solid state" tech requires many more moving parts to make a complete working system than conventional refrigeration: need one mechanism to apply/relieve stress and something to alternately expose the working media to hot and cold sides, which likely means a set of pumps and valves. If you don't want HFCs in refrigeration systems, use anything else. You can use almost anything non-toxic and non-corrosive that has a usable gas-liquid transition on its phase diagram. We have heat pumps that use propane, butane, CO2, NH4, etc. as the working fluid. HFCs dominate only because they are generally non-flammable, non-toxic and their larger molecules have conveniently low operating pressures that enable the use of light-weight (cheap) components.
New refrigerants also bring profits to chemical companies. At this point, we might as well just switch to propane, since the new refrigerants being introduced seem to be flammable.
These are heat pumps that simply use a different phase transition than the vaporization of other heat pumps. They probably use complicated and versatile mechanisms in this research phase while working out properties. But if it pans out I'd bet some pretty simple mechanism could be devised. For instance, a rotating wheel with nitinol spokes could have flows past either top or bottom spokes to cool or heat. That might work to heat and cool a vehicle. Someone with expertise thinking about it for more than two minutes can likely find better solutions than mine.
@@alans1816 A simple wheel doesn't have a strain application and removal function. The simplest way I can think of is an eccentric hub and rim arrangement. You'd also need some sort of seal to prevent the cold side from mixing with the hot side where the spokes transit between sides, otherwise you are going to have massive issues with pressure differentials causing huge leaks between sides. With a conventional refrigeration system, the cold and hot sides are completely isolated from each other by radiators and refrigerant, no worries about air or liquid from one side contaminating the other. If you want to prevent cross-contamination with semi-solid state tech, you likely need intermediate heat exchange steps to isolate the heat pump media from both sides: you don't want your intermediate media (ex.: 50% ethylene glycol) to get contaminated nor leak/evaporate to environment on either side and require potentially frequent periodic maintenance to clean or at least top-up. A bare-element semi-solid heat pump seems like it would only have potential in applications where you want to move heat between domains where cross-contamination is a non-issue. One possible such application would be fine-tuning air delivery temperature on a per-outlet basis in HVAC systems: calculate how much heat/cooling needs to be delivered overall, set bulk air to the average, then let individual heat pumps take/remove whatever heat they need from pass-through to achieve their intended outlet temperature. The air on both sides of the pumps is the same, only difference is temperature.
@@alans1816 And exactly what weight a spoked wheel in a heat pump would bear? None. The eccentric load needs to be generated somehow. An eccentric hub and rim riding on bearings rigidly mounted to the housing with whatever offset is appropriate for the spoke length used keeps everything in perfectly constant relative positions. Manufacturing wise, you can simply thread the spokes from the "compressed" side where they require the least tension to set. If you use spring-loaded or pneumatic idler wheels to apply force on a regular spoked wheel instead of an offset hub, you now have to deal with a rim suspended on springs (spokes and spring/pneumatic idlers) that no longer guarantee relative position of anything to anything, complicating rim and spoke sealing while making the whole thing more sensitive to any imbalances.
6:25-6:35 a good example, Stretching rubber bands really fast and they get hot. Then they cool down and then you can let them rest before stretching/heating them up again!
Hi ! I am from Germany ! We have a meterial , witch is a combination of two metals. "Be-metal" ! It has one part bending by heat . The other part is not easy to bend with the same amount of heat. I think they use them as a safty in specific Products. Disconnecting the energy flow ! ? I am a layman ! Witch is a person with not much knowledge in a lot of aspecs. I was thinking . Combining this cooling material with a Be-metal . This would make it a three-metal ! Heat makes the three metal bend. The cooling effect should be way faster with the be-metal. By the way. Superconductors or flowting could be the next stepp with a faster cooling option. This could change the way of flying a drone in future. Stay healthy !
In the 80's we used LN2 to cool SiLi detectors in the analytical tools attached to electron microscopes where they tried Peltier Thermoelectric cooling to reduce LN2 waste but most people just stuck with refilling the LN2 Dewar's every few days.
I would love it if you did an episode on the bass-cannon fire extinguisher! It's been under the radar for almost 10 years now and if there is still work being put into it then it's been under tight-knit wraps. And I think you could help bring attention to such revolutionary technology as well as possibly being to light the progress made on it!
@@m1kem477hewz This reminds me of the people referring to people harnessing the wind over pizeoelectric surfaces generating electricity. I honestly don't care if the parts move or not - but if there is a moving part, it's eventually going to break and that needs to become part of the maintenance and cost of operation equations.
You must know that there is no relationship between what you call “moving parts” and breakage. This is something that happens in any device and in any system, even with electronics and electricity. I have a hair dryer that after a while it no longer heated the air. When we opened it, we found that the wire ( resistive wire ) that runs through it had broken, The heating wire was cut off (broken). One time, my internet router was not working even though the subscription had not expired yet. We noticed that it was covered in dust. When we cleaned it well, it came back to work again (now if it had “moving parts,” they would have said that the reason was “moving parts" This is ridiculous). I will give you another example, I found the refrigerator protection device one day not working well. When I opened it, the circuits had some rust and some of the capacitors were also broken. It is naive to link certain matters to a specific system and limit them to it, as this can happen with all systems. When electrons (electricity) pass through something, they gradually consume it, like the heating elements in the example I mentioned. This also happens with capacitors, where the dielectric collapses. Another thing is that the term “solid state” itself is wrong or exaggerated, because even the things they claim to be “solid state” are not that !!
4:18 you going over these shapes reminded me how important shapes are in chemistry, they literally determine the properties of the materials we work with.
The density of the systems seems to be the biggest obstacle. You can't have something bigger than your house to cool your house! The latent heat of refrigerants is really the secret sauce that allows evaporative systems to be so small. It doesn't seem like these devices will ever approach that.
Both titanium and nickel are expensive metals. These will not be cheap systems because of the sheer amounts of these metals involved. Meanwhile, propane works great in a vapor compression system, and its only downside is being flammable.
This is really interesting. One of the big problems structures in space have to deal with - space stations, capsules, etc - is how to shed heat since space is so empty. Massive radiators are necessary to keep artificial space environments from becoming too hot, like what's found in the various thermal control systems on the ISS. Solid State Cooling described here seems like it would be less prone to mechanical failure, and might eventually be more efficient in a space environment. Thanks for this video! I'll be very interested to watch the technology develop.
@@32BitJunkie I have this same worry. But then I thought of car suspension: the coil is compressed/decompressed constantly - and (under normal conditions) VERY rarely fail. We use torsion bars too - and they don't fail under normal conditions either. I think what kicked off our "fatigue fear" is that we are used to iron/steel: it can bend, but VERY little. This kind of materials used here can bend a LOT more than what we are used to.
Far more likely, practical and decent path solution of any "but bad dangerous chemicals of refrigeration" is "Just use CO2. Yeah pressure is higher, but we century ago figured out high pressure fluid equipment. Just matter of cost and scale". It won't catch fire. It isn't more environmentally toxic than us breathing out and usage hazard and danger situations are utter immersion situation of any "not enough oxygen in air to breathe" situation. Heck we straight out have internal alert system for "too much CO2, get out". That is the "I can't breathe" feeling. CO2 refrigerator leaks it's refrigerants out? Immediate mitigation.... open windows and doors to air out the place so there is enough oxygen around to breathe.
@@aritakalo8011 Yep, Europe is beating US on adoption. With the new administration coming in though, it's just gonna make adoption slower. Some companies will proceed anyhow. I've worked on a few cascade style racks that don't use CO2 directly; they use conventional refrigerants to cool the CO2 and pipe that down to the cases. There are full transcritical systems out there that use CO2 as the sole refrigerant. One concern I have for those is triple point, you're gonna have to train techs on how to deal with these new systems to prevent damage from CO2 turning into dry ice.
Honestly, with extremely careful tweaking, a compressor based ground-water-sourced heater can reach full-system COPs of 7+. (its just that most installers aren't very good in tuning, or that the time investment isn't worth the energy saving to hire a professional to do it)
As an engineer, I always look to phase change as the best way to move heat. I did not realize nitinol and rubber had phase changes in solid form. I have experienced both, but didn't realize that was phase change. I also experienced the heating, but did not notice the cooling. Good things to learn. However it isn't going to be more efficient than other refrigerants unless we can get two phase changes, like ice to water to steam is two changes. If a memory material could have two sequential phase changes in solid state, THEN we might be able to gain on the efficiency of a gas. As for eliminating chloroflourocarbons, that has already been done, many non-cfc gases could be used. And we have unexploited technologies, such as using molten tin to store heat for warming the house in winter.... Sand batteries, for example, are a waste of space and closer to 2% efficiency without a phase change.
Nickel and Titanium alloy? ouch that's going to be an expensive cooling system. Yep, around 150/kg. normal low carbon steel is .93/kg (actually 850/ton but scaled to the same units). Plain A572 construction beam steel is even cheaper than that.
Like ... the plane? That did in fact change everything? ... or like the satellite? That did in fact change everything? ... or like a drone? That did in fact change everything? ... or like ....
Both Elastochloric and magnetochloric effects Stresses a material in a way that restricts the degree of atomic vibration freedom. The next part is important we might say there are three degrees of possible motion, (x,y,z). If we restric atomic motions in the z direction, a given amount of energy now vibrates more in x and y. In other words, its thermal capacity is reduced, thus a given amount of energy already in the substance makes it hotter when the degrees of freedom of motion is restricted, and the new hotter temperature substance may release its heat to its surroundings.
2:38 I was so disappointed as a kid when I found out that we use nuclear power to boil water to vapor in order to get electricity and not get it directly from a nuclear reaction :)
assuming you are no longer a kid, i hope you understand the issues of direct conversion - especially transmission. you may be disappointed again to learn that fusion energy (which is still 30 years away - it always is) is expected to be used to boil water and spin turbines - the good old Rankine cycle - which is at best 40% efficient - so 60% of the heat goes into the environment. solar PVs address these issues best right now
No, you werent bro. Like we do use nuclear power directly from a reaction...its just that that power is limited by materials from heat exchange. RTGs have been used for powering lighthouses, satellites, and even pacemakers for decades now...but they just cant power a city. Its not feasible
Of course I would interested in any new way to cool. I also see that there would be a stress fatigue, and that would cause eventual breaking in the wires. Of course, properly designed wire sections would allow easy replacement. Then, here is a bit of a rub and opportunity, those wired can be used to make, new unstresed wire. That recyclability is the opportunity, but the rub is the energy to do that So, the total efficiency of the system needs to take that into consideration when evaluating the energy efficiency. Meeting existing liquid based efficiency, without the recycle cost being included would make it a failure. It will need to meet that goal while including that energy cost. (Liquid does not get stress fractures and break.)
Well the fact you can't recycle the gas in other systems already would be a total win over current methods. Even if it takes power to remake new - the other escapes and can't be reused at all thus we have to make more and that gets release back into the gas system that would take A LOT more power to get back out of...
@clintelawson doesn't really happen especially not nearly as often as total failure of coal and oil based counterpart not to mention their impact on the green house effect is far greater than total nuclear energization would be
Love this video! Having just gone through re-doing my original line set that the original contractor put in just 2 years ago, I can safely say that anything that does away with all that time and labor would likely be a big win. Why did I have to replace it? My original contractor used 5/8" and 3/8" copper lines with numerous unnecessary 90 degree bends, but according to Bosch's clear instructions for the length and lift needed, it should have been 7/8" & 3/8" with gradual arc bends where possible. This made it noisy and inefficient. Sigh. So I did the removal and installation of a fresh, pre-insulated line set, handling the crawling and clamping and insulation splicing (under the careful oversight of an actual HVAC contractor) in the tight spaces wearing a respirator. While great for my sorely needed core strengthening, it was quite the gymnastics challenge, especially in the 95F heat. I also re-did the outdoor line set cover to ensure I have no bare copper in the outdoor elements to corrode from condensation and trapped moisture, and I installed a proper UV resistant covering over the outdoor portions that leads to the heat pumps, additionally protecting them from degradation due to UV rays. Finally, I used some thick rubber matt behind the wall on the re-done line-set to reduce the transmission of vibration (noise) of the lineset into the bedroom space right behind it. So on top of the environmental benefits of not worrying about the gases that are released during the discharging and recharging of the system that turned out to happen about 6 times overall for each of our two heat pumps (due to a clogged filter during a purge and other complications), something without the liquid could be a huge cost (labor) and material (copper) savings too. Too bad solid state cooling doesn't sound at all likely to be mature enough to avoid 2026's requirement to use A2L refrigerants given their flammability which I'd much prefer not having coursing through my home. But maybe it will be the tech behind the day that I replace my entire heat pump system. I'm told these days I'll be lucky if I don't have to worry about that rip and replace until about 12 to 15 years from now, unlike my prior home whose central air conditioner and line set lasted over 25 years.
I still don't understand why flammable refrigerants are such a issue when we consider how many homes have natural gas or propane appliances. Such appliances have a virtually unlimited supply compared to the small amount needed when used as a refrigerant.
@Wooble57 it's different because refrigerants are compressed, so you end up with propane running through a compressor up to maybe 200 psig. Also, the refrigerant exists in two phases through the system and liquid propane has a lot more bulk than vapor. A break could potentially set off the equivalent of a long burning propane torch if it ignites.
@@CasualGamerCC the only time you have high pressure is when the system is sealed though. Yes liquid propane exists when used as a refrigerant, but that's also how it's stored for use in appliances. A fridge might use a few oz of propane to function, a home might have a tank with many hundreds of pounds. Heck, even a 20lb bbq tank has 20x or more the amount that would be in a fridge. Natural gas is a little different, it's not stored in a liquid state, but supply is effectively infinite in this context. A natural gas stovetop would burn through a btu equivalent is about 4.5 minutes. I'm not saying flammable refrigerants are safe, but i still don't see anything here explaining why they are more dangerous than having a gas supply to the house in general.
@Wooble57 Fair enough, I suppose my bias is showing. For my 33 year old home, when renovating we ripped out all natural gas lines and bulky baseboard radiators, we plugged up and insulated our chimney and flu, and went all electric for everything including solar and battery storage. So the notion of adding something flammable in our next heating/cooling system has less appeal for us. I tend toward solutions that reduce risks, especially as it’s our forever home where simpler/safer long term investments are most appealing as we age and try to reduce cost variability.
@@TinkerTry There could be a reason flammable refrigerants are more of a hazard than gas appliances, and if they are I would love to know the mechanism. It would be unfortunate considering their environmental benefit though. It just feels like a lot of people give them a unfairly hard time with what I know. Options to reduce climate change that are economically feasible are limited and we could use all the ones we can get our hands on.
Nitinol has been around since the '60s, and I see no evidence that this is suddenly ready to commercialize on a wide scale. Matt, it feels like in the past year you are getting further and further away from the basics of Undecided: deciding whether a technology is ready to go or just aspirational hype.
Did you even watch the Video? He literally shows a little clip and says, that the first only dedicated Conference about this topic was last year. So yes, there is a big difference to the '60s...
@@pizzamannmann5239 exactly. this technology has been around for 60 years, and the first conference about the current iteration of this longstanding tech was just last year. So there's nothing to be decided on about it yet... thank you for backing up my point.
I remember a diode refrigerator I got out of an rv that was left. It had a plug that was reversible, and would keep things warm. It ran on 12v but had an adapter that did 120v... it definitely would get cold, and zero noise.
As we all know you stress metal it breaks in two. Metal doesn’t like bending or stressed for a long period of time before it breaks. I think there’s a lot more that needs to. Go into this technology before it makes it to the consumer.
I don’t think this is stress in the way you’re thinking… I think this is more like springs ( I am not an engineer or physicist so I could be way off here )
@@MurderMostFowl Yes, it is more like springs here but with a lot more motion capability. Cycle life should be in the billions just like springs when used within specifications. And just like springs, when pushed outside of specifications then permanent deformation and loss of functionality would occur.
An air to water heat pump keeps all four phases of the vapor cycle in the outside box and use water to take the heat into or out of the house. Since the refrigerant never comes inside, propane, which is a more efficient refrigerant than fluorocarbons, can be used as the refrigerant without worry about potential leaks inside leading to a fire or explosion. And if there is a propane leak in the outside unit it has less impact since propane has a far lower global warming potential than fluorocarbons and zero ozone depleting potential. Plus propane is very inexpensive relative to fluorocarbons.
Plenty has. Capital and getting things to economies of scale takes time. Especially when embedded special interests run interference for fossil fuels. Took fossil fuels generations to come to dominance. Will be much faster for newer tech, even with people running interference.
@@dropkickjohny He's actually showing the technology as it's being introduced. It still has to be adopted yes, but that's a far cry from an unhinged "promise" based on no clear estimates to get pre-funding that's diverted to other projects and pocketbooks.
@@dropkickjohny Lots have, from batteries in your cellphone / tablet to energy systems that have taken over the world such as air pumps. Have you been living under a rock or something kid? Solar keeps getting better and cheaper and something everyone uses if they use anything in this world. The only difference is that tech takes time to expand and go everywhere as the demands of tech is different for everyone and the cost to do so. Most of the stuff you even used today is already 10 years old give or take from when it was first release back 10 years ago lol. Todays CPUs that release were already design on paper at least 5 years ago just to give an example of how long can even chips, the fastest tech that reaches outwards to everyone, just to be in your hands.
Nitinol was a fun toy in the young robotics hobby groups 20 years ago being called 'muscle wires'. Heat it with electricity it will shrink, and it will relax as it cools (or the other way around, I can never remember). Anyway companies were selling 'walking robot insects' that walk using these wires. A neat toy. Glad to see the material being used in more practical uses.
@1:00 as soon as I seen that spring I knew this was going to be about nitinol , its used for shaping plane wings as well as it can auto adjust its shape without the need of hydraulics and other heavy things to controll it
It's bewildering to me to think that there might be so many different aspects of physics which are yet to be explored, which could fundamentally alter our relationship with the planet and our industries, it's just so exciting that there's so much potential!
When I see things like this I feel like: Now we know how the A/C system works on the starship Enterprise. Big ideas have small beginnings. As usual, awesome work.
I live in the mountains and I bought heat pumps for each room all powered by solar. I’m definitely interested in heating and cooling with solid-state. It’s another piece of the puzzle to sustainability
You can do phase change heat transfer with water, it's just not efficient at the temperatures and pressures we want to run fridges and a/c units. Water does work well at higher temperatures and pressures, like in the heat recycling systems of some power plants. It also needs to be EXTREMELY pure. I know of one naval nuclear reactor technician who commented that 1 part per million of contaminants in the water loop was 2 parts too many.
@@johns5504 Steam turbines is the most common way of converting heat to motion, so we did not really move away from steam engines, they are just not pistons anymore.
I like this even if it's just for the lack of pressurized refrigerant. Even when the refrigerating vapor is relatively safe for the environment, you still have to rely on a system staying leak-free and under pressure for years. Having something that relies on what seem to be fancy springs and coils sounds like it should be stable for way longer.
Awesome to learn of a "new" technology coming to light. As said, the COP is of the unit not the conversion. A bigger fish in the pond is how do we use this energy more efficiently, as "any" technology can plug into a building envelope. We need as much attention in the design of buildings and how the HVAC is integrated then anything. No matter what the COP is on any unit 3 or 20. If the building it is placed in is not designed efficiently, what does the COP matter? As the latter much harder to tackle, I think I will work on that and let any "technology" plug into my building.
The presenter and subject matter aside, I am compelled to highly compliment the designer of Undecided’s logo’s. For whatever my lone opinion is worth, (and in my near eight years) it is the most intuitive logo I have ever seen.
I'm thinking about a design where you have lots of wires and two plates on an axle which keeps the plates at the same distance. The wires go through holes in the plates. You can then turn the plates to add tension to the wires. That would allow for a lot of wires and a simple mechanic to use them.
The 200 W demonstrator you mentioned is equivalent to about 682 BTU/hr, or around 0.05 Tons of cooling. My house has about 3 tons installed, and for a lot of commercial installations I engineer, we put in around 15-30 tons. I understand this is just the prototype stage, but I'm skeptical to put it lightly. I'd place a lot more hope in magnetic cooling than this tech. Interesting and novel, it sure is. But capable of operating at a large scale for years and decades? Unlikely any time soon.
I wish I could get in touch with some of these experts to talk about its use in portable cooling options, like making a cooling suit, or a handheld AC unit. Imagine one of those handheld fans that blows actual cold air, rather than just moving air around.
NiTi is a very good thermal conductor. If you put stress in load section of the wire and leave other section always relieved, the relieved part will transfer heat into load section. Now, if the relieved part has a big cooling fan, when you relieve the stress form load section, the heat that it absorbed to return the shape would transfer into fan section and it could blow heat away. So theoretically, the maximum COP it this configuration must be the same as air cooled system. You didn't notice the heat from the wire you demonstrated because you still have a long wire left before it reaches your hand. But, I played with dental NiTi with d=0.1mm and L=50mm, heating with a small lighter at one tip and holding it at another tip, it burned my finger when it came back to shape.
So i saw the "thing" at 14:22 and thought: Maybe the best design would be like a double-ring-system, where the two rings are connected with elastomeric compounds, but the inner ring can be adjusted to get very slightly off-center to create a stretch for the material on one side and a chill site on the other side. You then can use a 2 way system to exchange the heat to the environment via a fluid and to exchange the less-heat to the chamber which has to be cooled. But i think there would be a problem with the separation of the 2 sides because the 2 rings are changing the sides constantly. So you probably end up with the same problems, a Wankel or Liquid Piston Engine encountered during its development.
If I need coolant to transport the cold, I see a combined technology here. The air compressed by the compressor is expanded over the deformed, heated metal while the metal is bent back where it cools down itself. This could achieve a very efficient low level of cold. Very exciting topic.
Considering how often I need to top up the refrigerant in my car or home central air system a refrigerant free system is definitely desirable. IF it's comparably efficient, similar in size and weight for performance, and not dramatically more expensive. It's unlikely to get there right away after the first commercial devices hit the market, that's why we call it the "early adopter cost".
@@darthhodges If the refrigerant needs to be topped up, the system is broken and you are fixing the symptom rather than the actual issue. It should be a closed system, needing topping up is an indication that there's a leak, for the performance of the system, the environment and cost, the leak should be identified and fixed, at which point there shouldn't be any further need to top-up.
@@dantucny No system is perfectly closed. And often the time and expertise needed to find and repair the leak is more expensive than topping it up every other year.
@@darthhodgesyes they are. They are perfectly closed. The loss is from molecules penetrating the permeable coolant path. The same way a dog can smell drugs through anything. The same way a latex balloon loses air. It should last a very long time if there are no leaks.
When you first mentioned caloric cooling I got a mental picture of my fridge raiding it's contents to power itself - made me chuckle to think of coming home to an empty fridge with a note saying sorry 🤣
This would be cool for mini fridges, as it would be more efficient than peltiers. For larger fridges I imagine the existing designs would still be more practical.
I fast-forwarded through most of this video, so I don't know if this was addressed: FWIU this system requires the area being heated to be adjacent to the one being cooled. Systems using refrigerant are easy to extend, able to separate the two areas. If you don't have an easy place to mount both functions together you'll still need some sort of liquid system with a radiator to pump the heat in or out. At which point using a refrigerant and adding a compressor is actually a simpler solution.
One calorie is the energy required to raise the temperature of 1 cm^3 (1 gram, 1 milliliters) of water 1 degree Celsius. One Kcal also called a Calorie is the energy required for 1000cm^3 (1kg or 1 liter) to rise 1 degree C*. Human food is described in Kcals (Calories) not calories.
Matt, you videos are awesome, and are one of the reasons I did my master's thesis in renewable energy. So thank you. At the same time, those animated and audible chapter transition inserts are not helping with the floor and quickly became subjectively annoying
Whole Earth Index's Softech magazine used to write about Nitinol back in the 70s. They were a weird hippy/hacker version of do it yourself environmentalism. “Soft Tech is a term we’ve used and defended since the late sixties. Soft signifies that something is alive, resilient, adaptive, maybe even lovable.” More prosaically I could see this being used in a CPU heatsink.
Would you be interested in an elastocaloric fridge or air conditioner? Use code 50UNDECIDED to get 50% OFF plus free shipping on your first Factor box at bit.ly/3BRkS87!
If you liked this, check out Why The US Military Chose Silicon-Graphene Batteries ruclips.net/video/l60hjFvj64s/видео.html
much love as always to Matt, the family and the team!
Matt you say nothing can liberate us but Dipole Electron Flood Theory just might create free portable clean safe electricity in a lunchbox. The Theory....
We used light and created sterile muons and electron showers.
Anatomy of the Proton.
Dipole Electron Flood Theory is a new Atomic model that changes the nucleus from a completely positive into a dipole made of tiny dipoles called Dirac Neutrinos instead of a large positive-only core. Protons and Neutrons are made of dipoles in certain stable quantities that we now call atoms in various sizes.
There are other refrigerants that can be used besides CFCs. CO2, nitrogen, helium, air, hydrogen, natural gas etc .
Matt may I ask why my comment about Dipole Electron Flood Theory was removed?
Dipole Electron Flood theory states the proton is made of about 1839 Dipoles and Neutrons about 1840....If Electrons are dipoles (and I prove they are experimentally) it changes everything. Can we talk?
Heating and cooling with elastomerics seems like a bit of a stretch.
best comment 🙌🏼
i see what you did there 😆
Heyoooo!
Ow, I think I pulled a mental muscle reading that.
LMAO !
Small comment from someone who did research in elastocalorics on NiTi alloys: martensite doesnt turn to austenite under stress. Martensite is a twinned configuration in NiTi, and deforming it, de-twins it. The detwinned martensite is turning to austenite when heated up and back to twinned martensite when cooling down without mechanical load.
Also superelasticity with NiTi refers to an austenitic alloy turning directly into detwinned martensite under mechanical load and back to its original shape (which is saved in the auatenitic state) when taking away the stress. This way, up to 8 or 10% of seemingly elastic deformation is possible. In comparison, steel can only exhibit around 0.1% elastic deformation.
Happy to explain more or answer other questions.
Regards from Germany ✌️
How many cycles of 8% deformation can it withstand?
@@circuitdotlt fatigue is a gradual phenomenon, so full 8% maybe a few to a dozen cycles... Highly depends on microstructure and purity of the alloy
@@McReinsenHi! I'm doing my PhD on improving fatigue life of elastocaloric alloys (copper based ones)
NiTi alloys can go up to 100 000 cycles even 1million in a recent study but the stress is lower for an elastocaloric application.
My alloy CuZnAl last 10 000cycles for now and the target for an industrial applications in about 10 million cycles so there's work to do but we're on the good way
Out of curiousity why are we not seeing more interest in it for artificial muscle?
It feels like a natural substitute for artificial limbs... Is it a longevity, cost or sone other factor?
@@McReinsen Excellent comment!
Having worked with nitinol, I had to learn the fatigue properties. With constant amplitude deformation, it is considered to have infinite life. It's supposed to be better than Ti64, which we actually tested one time to 40 billion cycles @ 300 MPa before we got sick of testing and started cutting grooves in the sample to force it to fail.
It really was a fun trick to hold a thick wire or small bar of nitinol to your lower lip and bend/unbend it. The change in temperature is pretty shocking. As a cheap alternative, you can do the same with a fat rubber band, stretching/unstretching it. Because you can stretch it more, you also get a dramatic change in temperature.
and how much do you think one would need to cool down a house?
@@roboticdem0n it comes down to latent heat which is the amount of cooling energy that can be harnessed from one mechanical cycle. Binary NiTi alloys can get up to 20-30 Joules of energy per gram of material, but this is for full transformation of the material without considering fatigue and therefore lifetime. Improved alloys with more alloying elements can be more stable while providing an optimized energy conversion. It's still a basic research topic, so hard to say what an actual functioning machine might look like and how it would perform. I've personally seen COP of around 14-18 in full transformation (thermal energy harnessed divided by mechanical energy spent). I'm guessing COP of around 5-10 could be realistic, which is 2-3x than what can be achieved with a gas compression cycle. So 2-3x more efficient and therefore cheaper.
"...before we got sick of testing and started cutting grooves in the sample to force it to fail" - how many licks does it take?
@@McReinsen yea but how big would it need to be to cool lets say a house of 240m² or 2600ft²
because a "brick" the size of a car on the side of your house is not practical
@@McReinsen isn't the main issue moving it from where you want to be cool to where you want to be warm? Liquids are easy, but moving something solid is more of a challenge I can imagine.
I remember as a kid noticing that rubber bands got hot when you stretch them and cold when they relax. I saw a crazy project someone built that put masses of rubber bands on a rotating rack that constantly stretched and released them while blowing air across them. It did manage to cool & heat air but wasn't what you'd call efficient.
Modern kitchen appliances in general are horrible.
That was Ben from Applied Science who made the rubber band fridge. It was pretty cool.
You can also simply take a thick-ish rubber band and stretch it, hold it against your skin and you can feel the heat. Keep it stretched and blow room temperature air against the rubber band for a minute and then suddenly release the tension - hold again against your skin and the rubber band feels ice cold.
@@integerofdoom69 what are you comparing when you say modern kitchen appliances are horrible?
Unless rubber bands have the same property as these elastometrics- that they cool down further when de-stressed than they heat up when under stress- then they’re not only inefficient, they’re not really doing any cooling at all. The big rubber band machine would just be cooling by 5 degrees and then heating by 5 degrees, and then cooling by 5 degrees and then heating by 5 degrees….
I assume it's for the algorithm, but does every title have to be "How [x] will change/revolutionize *every*thing"? Can't it be a less sensational, more descriptive title?
@@hossboss85 yeah but then your click through rate drops %15. Blame the dummies that won’t click without a ridiculous title lol
@@ArtyMars Fair enough. I clicked through anyway this time, but I'm less likely to in the future. The same happened to SilverCymbal and his sensational titles--I stopped watching his videos--but I'm in the minority and won't move the engagement needle. Let the sensational titles continue. "This one easy trick will change your life!"
@@ArtyMars are they dummies if they don't want to hear about some pie in the sky "innovation" that ends up leading to nothing? Rather use those 5 minutes to actually do something productive.
"Cause its my job so i have to follow the crowd and maximise my money"
unfortunately not, he has internet bills to pay he can't make these videos from the street.
And what about Fatigue? How many circles will it last before breaking up? Will it last for 25 years?
@@V.D. That was what I was wondering... And thereafter - How easy is it to recycle or reuse?
mmmm microplastics generator
@@Sismodium Hard to guess at fatigue life but nearly all other metals simply heated to liquid state and allowed to reform their crystalline structure will renew any depleted elasticity. So should be straightforward to recycle.
no they will fail
@jameshisself7375 doesn't matter end consumers and distributors would never accept the kinds of failure rates we'd be talking about
I was watching one of those RUclips channels where a couple is building their dream home and I ran across a technology I hadn't seen before. It's just another take on solar heating, but it seems more advanced. They use evacuated glass tubes. Basically, it's like setting a clear thermos in the sun, or having a well insulated greenhouse. I hadn't seen them before so if you covered them I missed it (or my brain just has too many things in it and is starting to leak). The couple had a big enough array that they needed a pool to dump waste heat into to keep them from overheating when they weren't needed.
A while back I saw that they are starting to get aerogels that are clear enough and that don't degrade in sunlight, to start insulating between window panes. There is at least one commercial company selling them. That, if they don't discolor and are as durable as they claim, could be a holy grail for construction, making windows as thermally tight as walls.
I've seen a couple other small techs... there is a type of manufactured board... super simple, where two 2x4s are put at right angles and connected with dowels. This limits the thermal bridging to just the dowel spots. You put insulation in between them. They don't require any special construction techniques. Someone used to using 2x4s can switch to using them no problem. Not worth an episode on their own, but maybe an episode where you covered a bunch of the less glamorous, lower cost, smaller breakthroughs?
Evacuated tube solar thermal collectors have been around for decades and are a significant part of the market in some countries.
Could you please explain why aerogel insulates better than standard air?
@@flowgangsemaudamartoz7062 it has very little convection
@@nickwinn7812 I’ve got a pair of panels on top of my greenhouse that were scavenged from a 1980s/1990s project for heating water for cleaning locomotives and railcars. There are a few variations on a theme with the tube arrays, from the basic glycol or water circulating directly inside the tube, with a copper pipe pushing the fluid to the bottom of the tube and it’s extracted out the top, to versions that have a sealed phase-change material inside the tube to move the heat around.
Which brings me to another product I saw being pitched for mid to low latitudes where you have a high temperature delta from day to night… insulation/thermal mass pouches with a phase-change gell in them that absorbs the temperature variance and aims to keep balanced temperatures inside the dwelling, which I found very interesting. I suspect something like that would not perform very well in places where it gets in negative temperatures and stays there, but as a retrofit to wooden or steel skinned structures in teh desert it might have potential for passive heating/cooling cycles.
once 8 years ago saw a youtuber built a small hand crank rubber band refrigerator for cooling I have wondered about this kind of thing ever since then.
Applied Science?
I'm pretty sure this exact video is why he mentioned "natural rubber"
@Mariano.Bernacki yes, that was the first video I ever watched on RUclips!
The _Applied Science_ video is called "A refrigerator that works by stretching rubber bands"
Me going into the video: I can't wait to see how it isn't viable in the last 4 minutes
Micro fridges are a perfect fit for this new tech. They are currently very inefficient since they are thermo electric.
Technology Connections recently did a video on these, and found that they kinda suck. Very buyer beware, actually.
@@SkepticalCaveman This assumes it's scalable to small sizes. I mean maybe, but not obvious.
@@grekiki And lets not forget ... cost! It does not matter how good your tech is, if the cost is even a few percentage higher then a industry established process, you tend to fail in gaining market share. People underestimate at how thin the margins are in some industries. A few percentage more expensive at the source, can be 50% or more, at the customer.
This is why so many other, better techs, simply never gotten commercialized (or not mass commercialized) because the market does not support it. I mean, look at basic EVs, ... Tesla did not invest them, EVs have existed for 100+ years. And even today, EVs are extreme heavy, and costly, compared to the same combusting engine tech. With range penalties ... Everybody is looking at the magic battery, and yet, same issue, there are better batteries but cost/weight/safety...
And then we have the smart approach like BYD does, with their 1100km cars, hybrid! ICE for power delivery, with the rest "EV". And that range is not fake... Sometimes you need to combine tech, to get the best advantage.
Maybe metal combined with airco technology is a better solution? Who knows but right now, its just another one of those "future" techs that we will probably never see in this talked about market (maybe in other markets, sure).
I remember when the tech for those mini fridges came out, it was supposed to be an epic game changer...... it wasnt
@@benjiro8793 There has to be some other qualities or improvement to the process to give some incentive for the customer. If those technologies are similar in performance with one being high priced,market will not respond for environmental reasonings. But if you add something in terms of performance or quality then market will respond despite being expensive.
Without knowing more about the specifics of the options, that 'really small" space that includes 'a can or bottle of a softdrink' really isn't necessarily a negative. There is a fairly huge need in the medical community for small refrigerators that have about that much space in them. Think insulin pens for diabetics, and other medicine that should be refrigerated for best results, yet you may want close at hand in the bedroom or at the office. An option for that is Peltier coolers, but after watching the Technology Connections episode on those, and keeping in mind the fairly high power requirements for them, I'm not sure that's a useful solution. Among their problems includes the fact that they really only provide about a 40F, or 21c temperature difference across the peltier chip, which means that if the outside temp of the refrigerator is over 100F to begin with, you're only "cooling" the contents to 60 F, which may not be sufficient. You might be able to do better by adding a second cooling stage, but that adds complexity, which may not be a good thing.
The problem I see with the elastocaloric refrigerator would be that it may not require a fluid to transfer, but I'd be concerned about the noise involved. That is going to depend on how the system 'works' for doing the heat transfer through the material, but so0 far I don't see enough information. Perhaps my concerns are for naught, but when I think of something that does thermal transfer through changing the shape of a material, I have to imagine that there are going to be mechanical noises involved. More so if you have to move fluids around as well. Then again, this is one of the first times I've even heard of the concept. IDK.
I agree with your opening opinion of, basically, there is no one silver bullet. I realize just because one resolution may not be ideal for my circumstances/location, doesn’t mean it is a waste. If we are to meet the ever growing demand for energy, we need to embrace the idea we will need multiple sources and different ways to best use the energy for the given application.
Metal fatigue is a deal breaker in many applications. A refrigerator built in 1970 will still be working just fine because refrigerants do not fatigue. The thing will weigh more than you can imagine and the original natural rubber gasket will be dry or rotten but it will still be working just fine. Of course they realized they lasted too long.
I hear you, but that same refrigerator has plenty of moving parts that did not fatigue.
Parts fail commonly bcause they are engineered for minimum cost with a minimum life.
60 years ago people built virtual-tanks out of everything because profit was so dominating.
I had the same thought. Just stretch a rubber band and you know it changes temperature, but try doing it 1000 times.
I could imagine having small panels that you can replace after failure and vary their workload to spread out the failure rate, so in 10 years when the refrigeration has deteriorated, you can replace the first broken panel, and then it would be a regular maintenance activity after that.
But yeah, definitely an issue.
The channel Applied Science actually built an elastic band refrigerator that I believe uses this effect.
It didnt do much in the way of cooling, but it does a good job of showing the principles.
Thanks, will check it out.
Thanks, will check it out.
In the 1970's, I attended a physics seminar on Nitinol. The speaker told us that the word is an acronym for Nickel-Titanium-Naval Ordnance Lab.
With the right kind of design with ceramics, you could create an oscillating micromotor with piezo-electric crystals providing the physical stresses and thermocouples providing an electromagnetic charge to pump into the crystals to release the stress, cooling down the material, and creating another charge when the temperature gets hot again; you can make a micro-heat-pump as a painted on layer on a microchip. Cool.
Thus creating a microchip with it's own integarted cooling system if a Nitinol structure was somehow added.
It would maybe not avoid the need for extra cooling, but it could reduce a lot of it and eventually reduce the energy consumption in data centres.
Thank you Matt. A really cool take on a really hot topic.
A moment of appreciation that Matt's video content actually SHOWS the stuff and the people he's talking about. Thanks for NOT using stock footage.
Since it's ultimately an electromechanical device, I would like to see a COP comparison for equal capacity between this and a Peltier based system. I think that would be a good illustration of efficiencies.
I think this phenomenon is used in the elastic band refrigerator that the channel Applied Science actually constructed. Although it didn't cool much, it does a nice job of illustrating the concepts.
Am I the only one confused about how you are meant to efficiently remove heat from the elastomer? Your cooler needs to turn into a radiator once per cycle, that means that you need to somehow switch whatever you are cooling with whatever medium you are dumping heat into constantly. I really don't see a use for this over traditional refrigerant based heat pumps outside of very niche applications.
You're not the only one. Short of physically moving the elastomer from one medium to another the only thing I can think of would be something like dual peltier elements but that's going to consume way more energy. How you could physically move the wires between refrigerents without having a nightmare of leaking valves I don't know. I'm glad smarter minds than mine are working on it!
I presume they will have heat transfer fluids, such as water or air circulating over the NiTi as it cools, and the water will cycle to each NiTi element for each cooling stress cycle. They can t be moving the solid into and out of the room for each stress / heat cycle.
Some designs I've observed use a pulley system that draws the elastic material through a loop; the pulleys spin at different speeds, arranged in such a way that the material stretches in some parts of the loop and relaxes in others.
@@PixlRainbow i could imagine how loud such a system might be.
This is exactly the major problem of solid state caloric cooling and heating devices. All their promises fail when they get to this problem. Most researchers talk about their expected efficiency leaving this problem aside (good to get funding). This is why the efforts in different room temperature caloric cooling systems never reached the market so far.
This video about elastocalorics is one of the best explanatory videos I have seen so far. We are extremely pleased that mateligent and iMSL were able to contribute video material. If you’re interested in diving deeper into the technology, patents, state of the art, and industrialization, we look forward to hearing from you.
I've been adding heat pumps to my lesser used rooms for the last couple years. They have been the best option for my needs, but an elastomeric system where I don't have to worry about freezing my hands off when refrigerant is needed, win.
A couple of in-use refrigerants have essentially no atmospheric damage potential (but do have their own problems). Ammonia is toxic if it releases, but is highly efficient, used in large commercial plants and small off-grid refrigerators. Propane is flammable if released, but is clean and highly efficient. It’s currently limited to 150 gram systems in US, though is available in larger systems in Europe. Improved safety/system venting will probably make it a viable replacement for HFC’s at the residential level.
Phase change material research has been one of the energy efficiency industry's holy grails for a fair amount of time (kind of like fusion research) - I have seen a number of periods of increased enthusiasm followed by an inevitable fade. If these newer? materials and their application are finally going to reach commercial viability in the foreseeable future that would be great.
CO2 is replacing HFCs especially in large refrigerators. CO2 taken from the atmosphere. 'the real key for cooling and heating of homes is passive home construction, maybe low cost aerogels in the future.
Looks like this "solid state" tech requires many more moving parts to make a complete working system than conventional refrigeration: need one mechanism to apply/relieve stress and something to alternately expose the working media to hot and cold sides, which likely means a set of pumps and valves.
If you don't want HFCs in refrigeration systems, use anything else. You can use almost anything non-toxic and non-corrosive that has a usable gas-liquid transition on its phase diagram. We have heat pumps that use propane, butane, CO2, NH4, etc. as the working fluid. HFCs dominate only because they are generally non-flammable, non-toxic and their larger molecules have conveniently low operating pressures that enable the use of light-weight (cheap) components.
New refrigerants also bring profits to chemical companies. At this point, we might as well just switch to propane, since the new refrigerants being introduced seem to be flammable.
These are heat pumps that simply use a different phase transition than the vaporization of other heat pumps.
They probably use complicated and versatile mechanisms in this research phase while working out properties. But if it pans out I'd bet some pretty simple mechanism could be devised.
For instance, a rotating wheel with nitinol spokes could have flows past either top or bottom spokes to cool or heat. That might work to heat and cool a vehicle. Someone with expertise thinking about it for more than two minutes can likely find better solutions than mine.
@@alans1816 A simple wheel doesn't have a strain application and removal function. The simplest way I can think of is an eccentric hub and rim arrangement. You'd also need some sort of seal to prevent the cold side from mixing with the hot side where the spokes transit between sides, otherwise you are going to have massive issues with pressure differentials causing huge leaks between sides.
With a conventional refrigeration system, the cold and hot sides are completely isolated from each other by radiators and refrigerant, no worries about air or liquid from one side contaminating the other. If you want to prevent cross-contamination with semi-solid state tech, you likely need intermediate heat exchange steps to isolate the heat pump media from both sides: you don't want your intermediate media (ex.: 50% ethylene glycol) to get contaminated nor leak/evaporate to environment on either side and require potentially frequent periodic maintenance to clean or at least top-up.
A bare-element semi-solid heat pump seems like it would only have potential in applications where you want to move heat between domains where cross-contamination is a non-issue. One possible such application would be fine-tuning air delivery temperature on a per-outlet basis in HVAC systems: calculate how much heat/cooling needs to be delivered overall, set bulk air to the average, then let individual heat pumps take/remove whatever heat they need from pass-through to achieve their intended outlet temperature. The air on both sides of the pumps is the same, only difference is temperature.
@@teardowndan5364 A spoked wheel bearing weight has the top spokes loaded (stretched) and the bottom spokes unloaded.
@@alans1816 And exactly what weight a spoked wheel in a heat pump would bear? None. The eccentric load needs to be generated somehow. An eccentric hub and rim riding on bearings rigidly mounted to the housing with whatever offset is appropriate for the spoke length used keeps everything in perfectly constant relative positions. Manufacturing wise, you can simply thread the spokes from the "compressed" side where they require the least tension to set.
If you use spring-loaded or pneumatic idler wheels to apply force on a regular spoked wheel instead of an offset hub, you now have to deal with a rim suspended on springs (spokes and spring/pneumatic idlers) that no longer guarantee relative position of anything to anything, complicating rim and spoke sealing while making the whole thing more sensitive to any imbalances.
6:25-6:35 a good example, Stretching rubber bands really fast and they get hot. Then they cool down and then you can let them rest before stretching/heating them up again!
Hi ! I am from Germany !
We have a meterial , witch is a combination of two metals.
"Be-metal" ! It has one part bending by heat . The other part is not easy to bend with the same amount of heat.
I think they use them as a safty in specific Products.
Disconnecting the energy flow ! ?
I am a layman ! Witch is a person with not much knowledge in a lot of aspecs.
I was thinking . Combining this cooling material with a Be-metal .
This would make it a three-metal !
Heat makes the three metal bend.
The cooling effect should be way faster with the be-metal.
By the way.
Superconductors or flowting could be the next stepp with a faster cooling option.
This could change the way of flying a drone in future.
Stay healthy !
@@perobaotic8098 it's called bi-metall, because it's made of two metals with different thermal expansion coefficients
In the 80's we used LN2 to cool SiLi detectors in the analytical tools attached to electron microscopes where they tried Peltier Thermoelectric cooling to reduce LN2 waste but most people just stuck with refilling the LN2 Dewar's every few days.
Video starts at 6:00
Thanks. I gave up 5 minutes in. Not watching the rest now out of spite :D
Legend
I would love it if you did an episode on the bass-cannon fire extinguisher! It's been under the radar for almost 10 years now and if there is still work being put into it then it's been under tight-knit wraps. And I think you could help bring attention to such revolutionary technology as well as possibly being to light the progress made on it!
Calling it solid state seems like a little bit of a stretch
@CGrantL it depends on how rigid or flexible the definition of "solid" is.
@@m1kem477hewz This reminds me of the people referring to people harnessing the wind over pizeoelectric surfaces generating electricity.
I honestly don't care if the parts move or not - but if there is a moving part, it's eventually going to break and that needs to become part of the maintenance and cost of operation equations.
Aaah-ha, "stretch", I see what you did there.
You must know that there is no relationship between what you call “moving parts” and breakage. This is something that happens in any device and in any system, even with electronics and electricity. I have a hair dryer that after a while it no longer heated the air. When we opened it, we found that the wire ( resistive wire ) that runs through it had broken, The heating wire was cut off (broken). One time, my internet router was not working even though the subscription had not expired yet. We noticed that it was covered in dust. When we cleaned it well, it came back to work again (now if it had “moving parts,” they would have said that the reason was “moving parts" This is ridiculous). I will give you another example, I found the refrigerator protection device one day not working well. When I opened it, the circuits had some rust and some of the capacitors were also broken. It is naive to link certain matters to a specific system and limit them to it, as this can happen with all systems. When electrons (electricity) pass through something, they gradually consume it, like the heating elements in the example I mentioned. This also happens with capacitors, where the dielectric collapses. Another thing is that the term “solid state” itself is wrong or exaggerated, because even the things they claim to be “solid state” are not that !!
"solid state" (Although it is a wrong term) not related to electronics and it is not limited to electronics.
4:18 you going over these shapes reminded me how important shapes are in chemistry, they literally determine the properties of the materials we work with.
Can't wait for the next 17 videos from Technology Connections on latent heat
Those are way better than this clickbaiter.
@ yes that’s why I said it
The density of the systems seems to be the biggest obstacle. You can't have something bigger than your house to cool your house! The latent heat of refrigerants is really the secret sauce that allows evaporative systems to be so small. It doesn't seem like these devices will ever approach that.
Both titanium and nickel are expensive metals. These will not be cheap systems because of the sheer amounts of these metals involved.
Meanwhile, propane works great in a vapor compression system, and its only downside is being flammable.
2:31 The _real_ meat and potatoes of this channel are the puns we made along the way ❤
I can also see some potential in getting water out of air from condensation.
100$ for 1L of water, ok?
This is really interesting. One of the big problems structures in space have to deal with - space stations, capsules, etc - is how to shed heat since space is so empty. Massive radiators are necessary to keep artificial space environments from becoming too hot, like what's found in the various thermal control systems on the ISS. Solid State Cooling described here seems like it would be less prone to mechanical failure, and might eventually be more efficient in a space environment.
Thanks for this video! I'll be very interested to watch the technology develop.
Impressive amount of wire puns today, keep up the good work 👍
Thank you, Matt! I was not aware of this technology at all.
I'm doing my PhD on this exact subject, I'm very surprised that you know this subject (nobody ever heard of it)
First time I ever heard of it, too. I wish you well on your PhD journey.
When can it be used to cool gaming PCs? 😂
Hey so is metal fatigue a problem? Is my nitenol fridge going to break down every other month?
@@kamrulhussein5811 is still nothing invented better than Heat pipes for cooling
@@32BitJunkie I have this same worry. But then I thought of car suspension: the coil is compressed/decompressed constantly - and (under normal conditions) VERY rarely fail. We use torsion bars too - and they don't fail under normal conditions either.
I think what kicked off our "fatigue fear" is that we are used to iron/steel: it can bend, but VERY little. This kind of materials used here can bend a LOT more than what we are used to.
As a supermarket refrigeration technician, this is fascinating. Probably not gonna see it at a big scale in my life time, but still pretty cool.
Far more likely, practical and decent path solution of any "but bad dangerous chemicals of refrigeration" is "Just use CO2. Yeah pressure is higher, but we century ago figured out high pressure fluid equipment. Just matter of cost and scale". It won't catch fire. It isn't more environmentally toxic than us breathing out and usage hazard and danger situations are utter immersion situation of any "not enough oxygen in air to breathe" situation. Heck we straight out have internal alert system for "too much CO2, get out". That is the "I can't breathe" feeling. CO2 refrigerator leaks it's refrigerants out? Immediate mitigation.... open windows and doors to air out the place so there is enough oxygen around to breathe.
@@aritakalo8011 Yep, Europe is beating US on adoption. With the new administration coming in though, it's just gonna make adoption slower. Some companies will proceed anyhow.
I've worked on a few cascade style racks that don't use CO2 directly; they use conventional refrigerants to cool the CO2 and pipe that down to the cases. There are full transcritical systems out there that use CO2 as the sole refrigerant. One concern I have for those is triple point, you're gonna have to train techs on how to deal with these new systems to prevent damage from CO2 turning into dry ice.
Modern commercial air source heat pumps can hit a CoP of 5. Over 4 is entirely reasonable for a real world SCoP.
Thanks Matt, I always learn something new from you! Keep the good work! Cheers!
Honestly, with extremely careful tweaking, a compressor based ground-water-sourced heater can reach full-system COPs of 7+.
(its just that most installers aren't very good in tuning, or that the time investment isn't worth the energy saving to hire a professional to do it)
As an engineer, I always look to phase change as the best way to move heat. I did not realize nitinol and rubber had phase changes in solid form. I have experienced both, but didn't realize that was phase change. I also experienced the heating, but did not notice the cooling. Good things to learn. However it isn't going to be more efficient than other refrigerants unless we can get two phase changes, like ice to water to steam is two changes. If a memory material could have two sequential phase changes in solid state, THEN we might be able to gain on the efficiency of a gas.
As for eliminating chloroflourocarbons, that has already been done, many non-cfc gases could be used. And we have unexploited technologies, such as using molten tin to store heat for warming the house in winter.... Sand batteries, for example, are a waste of space and closer to 2% efficiency without a phase change.
Nickel and Titanium alloy? ouch that's going to be an expensive cooling system.
Yep, around 150/kg. normal low carbon steel is .93/kg (actually 850/ton but scaled to the same units). Plain A572 construction beam steel is even cheaper than that.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, ideas and videos. Very interesting subject. Wishing you and your family the best.
"________ COULD CHANGE EVERYTHING" JUST FLEW OVER MY HOUSE!
Like ... the plane? That did in fact change everything? ... or like the satellite? That did in fact change everything? ... or like a drone? That did in fact change everything? ... or like ....
You could change everything
Both Elastochloric and magnetochloric effects Stresses a material in a way that restricts the degree of atomic vibration freedom.
The next part is important we might say there are three degrees of possible motion, (x,y,z). If we restric atomic motions in the z direction, a given amount of energy now vibrates more in x and y. In other words, its thermal capacity is reduced, thus a given amount of energy already in the substance makes it hotter when the degrees of freedom of motion is restricted, and the new hotter temperature substance may release its heat to its surroundings.
2:38 I was so disappointed as a kid when I found out that we use nuclear power to boil water to vapor in order to get electricity and not get it directly from a nuclear reaction :)
LOL yeah it's literally just trading coal for nuclear rods. I was disappointed too.
There are beta emitters as Nuclear sources, but they aren't as efficient as we would need for direct transmission.
The reall dissapointing part about Coal vs Nuclear is learning that Coal Power Plant causes more radioactive pollution in enviorment than Nuclear.
HOW
assuming you are no longer a kid, i hope you understand the issues of direct conversion - especially transmission.
you may be disappointed again to learn that fusion energy (which is still 30 years away - it always is) is expected to be used to boil water and spin turbines - the good old Rankine cycle - which is at best 40% efficient - so 60% of the heat goes into the environment.
solar PVs address these issues best right now
No, you werent bro. Like we do use nuclear power directly from a reaction...its just that that power is limited by materials from heat exchange. RTGs have been used for powering lighthouses, satellites, and even pacemakers for decades now...but they just cant power a city. Its not feasible
Of course I would interested in any new way to cool. I also see that there would be a stress fatigue, and that would cause eventual breaking in the wires. Of course, properly designed wire sections would allow easy replacement. Then, here is a bit of a rub and opportunity, those wired can be used to make, new unstresed wire. That recyclability is the opportunity, but the rub is the energy to do that So, the total efficiency of the system needs to take that into consideration when evaluating the energy efficiency. Meeting existing liquid based efficiency, without the recycle cost being included would make it a failure. It will need to meet that goal while including that energy cost. (Liquid does not get stress fractures and break.)
Well the fact you can't recycle the gas in other systems already would be a total win over current methods. Even if it takes power to remake new - the other escapes and can't be reused at all thus we have to make more and that gets release back into the gas system that would take A LOT more power to get back out of...
Interesting !!! thx. for the info.
Very cool. Excited to see where this goes, and what the backyard guys get up to with it!
0:50 Nuclear energy is already that savior 😮💨
@@itsjordo but when it melts down it destroys entire parts of the earth. Don’t say that doesn’t happen, it does and has and could in future.
If you plan to consume ourselves to extinction for no reason other than number go up
@clintelawson doesn't really happen especially not nearly as often as total failure of coal and oil based counterpart not to mention their impact on the green house effect is far greater than total nuclear energization would be
Just petition your town to sign up to store the nuclear waste so mine doesn’t have to, and I’ll be on board.
@@explorerofmind This is nonsensical.
Love this video! Having just gone through re-doing my original line set that the original contractor put in just 2 years ago, I can safely say that anything that does away with all that time and labor would likely be a big win. Why did I have to replace it? My original contractor used 5/8" and 3/8" copper lines with numerous unnecessary 90 degree bends, but according to Bosch's clear instructions for the length and lift needed, it should have been 7/8" & 3/8" with gradual arc bends where possible. This made it noisy and inefficient. Sigh. So I did the removal and installation of a fresh, pre-insulated line set, handling the crawling and clamping and insulation splicing (under the careful oversight of an actual HVAC contractor) in the tight spaces wearing a respirator. While great for my sorely needed core strengthening, it was quite the gymnastics challenge, especially in the 95F heat. I also re-did the outdoor line set cover to ensure I have no bare copper in the outdoor elements to corrode from condensation and trapped moisture, and I installed a proper UV resistant covering over the outdoor portions that leads to the heat pumps, additionally protecting them from degradation due to UV rays. Finally, I used some thick rubber matt behind the wall on the re-done line-set to reduce the transmission of vibration (noise) of the lineset into the bedroom space right behind it.
So on top of the environmental benefits of not worrying about the gases that are released during the discharging and recharging of the system that turned out to happen about 6 times overall for each of our two heat pumps (due to a clogged filter during a purge and other complications), something without the liquid could be a huge cost (labor) and material (copper) savings too. Too bad solid state cooling doesn't sound at all likely to be mature enough to avoid 2026's requirement to use A2L refrigerants given their flammability which I'd much prefer not having coursing through my home. But maybe it will be the tech behind the day that I replace my entire heat pump system. I'm told these days I'll be lucky if I don't have to worry about that rip and replace until about 12 to 15 years from now, unlike my prior home whose central air conditioner and line set lasted over 25 years.
I still don't understand why flammable refrigerants are such a issue when we consider how many homes have natural gas or propane appliances. Such appliances have a virtually unlimited supply compared to the small amount needed when used as a refrigerant.
@Wooble57 it's different because refrigerants are compressed, so you end up with propane running through a compressor up to maybe 200 psig.
Also, the refrigerant exists in two phases through the system and liquid propane has a lot more bulk than vapor. A break could potentially set off the equivalent of a long burning propane torch if it ignites.
@@CasualGamerCC the only time you have high pressure is when the system is sealed though.
Yes liquid propane exists when used as a refrigerant, but that's also how it's stored for use in appliances. A fridge might use a few oz of propane to function, a home might have a tank with many hundreds of pounds. Heck, even a 20lb bbq tank has 20x or more the amount that would be in a fridge.
Natural gas is a little different, it's not stored in a liquid state, but supply is effectively infinite in this context. A natural gas stovetop would burn through a btu equivalent is about 4.5 minutes.
I'm not saying flammable refrigerants are safe, but i still don't see anything here explaining why they are more dangerous than having a gas supply to the house in general.
@Wooble57 Fair enough, I suppose my bias is showing. For my 33 year old home, when renovating we ripped out all natural gas lines and bulky baseboard radiators, we plugged up and insulated our chimney and flu, and went all electric for everything including solar and battery storage. So the notion of adding something flammable in our next heating/cooling system has less appeal for us. I tend toward solutions that reduce risks, especially as it’s our forever home where simpler/safer long term investments are most appealing as we age and try to reduce cost variability.
@@TinkerTry There could be a reason flammable refrigerants are more of a hazard than gas appliances, and if they are I would love to know the mechanism. It would be unfortunate considering their environmental benefit though.
It just feels like a lot of people give them a unfairly hard time with what I know. Options to reduce climate change that are economically feasible are limited and we could use all the ones we can get our hands on.
Nitinol has been around since the '60s, and I see no evidence that this is suddenly ready to commercialize on a wide scale. Matt, it feels like in the past year you are getting further and further away from the basics of Undecided: deciding whether a technology is ready to go or just aspirational hype.
Did you even watch the Video? He literally shows a little clip and says, that the first only dedicated Conference about this topic was last year. So yes, there is a big difference to the '60s...
@@pizzamannmann5239 exactly. this technology has been around for 60 years, and the first conference about the current iteration of this longstanding tech was just last year. So there's nothing to be decided on about it yet... thank you for backing up my point.
I remember a diode refrigerator I got out of an rv that was left. It had a plug that was reversible, and would keep things warm. It ran on 12v but had an adapter that did 120v... it definitely would get cold, and zero noise.
As we all know you stress metal it breaks in two. Metal doesn’t like bending or stressed for a long period of time before it breaks. I think there’s a lot more that needs to. Go into this technology before it makes it to the consumer.
I don’t think this is stress in the way you’re thinking… I think this is more like springs ( I am not an engineer or physicist so I could be way off here )
@@MurderMostFowl Yes, it is more like springs here but with a lot more motion capability. Cycle life should be in the billions just like springs when used within specifications. And just like springs, when pushed outside of specifications then permanent deformation and loss of functionality would occur.
Comparing nitinol to other metals is like comparing super conductors to conductors.
Looks like my PC might finally stop sounding like it’s ready for takeoff. The future is looking cooler already! ❄
I knew materials science would save us from messy moving parts.
Now, we need a solid state wheel.
Paging Dr. Maglev
Sounds very interesting, cool, neato, mind-expanding!!
7:05 are you using chatgpt for your script? This part smells AI. A bad one.
This is just the quality of this channel, nothing new there
😂 or ... just a goofy joke. You do know I like bad puns and dad jokes, right?
An air to water heat pump keeps all four phases of the vapor cycle in the outside box and use water to take the heat into or out of the house. Since the refrigerant never comes inside, propane, which is a more efficient refrigerant than fluorocarbons, can be used as the refrigerant without worry about potential leaks inside leading to a fire or explosion.
And if there is a propane leak in the outside unit it has less impact since propane has a far lower global warming potential than fluorocarbons and zero ozone depleting potential. Plus propane is very inexpensive relative to fluorocarbons.
Likewise for carbon dioxide, helium and air.
Dude, every video you talk about some kind of game changer. Guess what, nothing has changed!!! Tell me another whopper Elon!
Plenty has. Capital and getting things to economies of scale takes time.
Especially when embedded special interests run interference for fossil fuels.
Took fossil fuels generations to come to dominance. Will be much faster for newer tech, even with people running interference.
@@dropkickjohny He's actually showing the technology as it's being introduced. It still has to be adopted yes, but that's a far cry from an unhinged "promise" based on no clear estimates to get pre-funding that's diverted to other projects and pocketbooks.
@@darkhorseman8263 Look at all the clickbait titles and tell me which game changing technology "changed everything" for you or even anyone you know?
@@dropkickjohnyway to miss the whole point kid
@@dropkickjohny Lots have, from batteries in your cellphone / tablet to energy systems that have taken over the world such as air pumps. Have you been living under a rock or something kid? Solar keeps getting better and cheaper and something everyone uses if they use anything in this world. The only difference is that tech takes time to expand and go everywhere as the demands of tech is different for everyone and the cost to do so. Most of the stuff you even used today is already 10 years old give or take from when it was first release back 10 years ago lol. Todays CPUs that release were already design on paper at least 5 years ago just to give an example of how long can even chips, the fastest tech that reaches outwards to everyone, just to be in your hands.
Nitinol was a fun toy in the young robotics hobby groups 20 years ago being called 'muscle wires'. Heat it with electricity it will shrink, and it will relax as it cools (or the other way around, I can never remember). Anyway companies were selling 'walking robot insects' that walk using these wires. A neat toy. Glad to see the material being used in more practical uses.
Second video from you that I saw in 2 days .. subscribed!
@1:00 as soon as I seen that spring I knew this was going to be about nitinol , its used for shaping plane wings as well as it can auto adjust its shape without the need of hydraulics and other heavy things to controll it
It's bewildering to me to think that there might be so many different aspects of physics which are yet to be explored, which could fundamentally alter our relationship with the planet and our industries, it's just so exciting that there's so much potential!
When I see things like this I feel like: Now we know how the A/C system works on the starship Enterprise. Big ideas have small beginnings. As usual, awesome work.
I live in the mountains and I bought heat pumps for each room all powered by solar. I’m definitely interested in heating and cooling with solid-state. It’s another piece of the puzzle to sustainability
You can do phase change heat transfer with water, it's just not efficient at the temperatures and pressures we want to run fridges and a/c units. Water does work well at higher temperatures and pressures, like in the heat recycling systems of some power plants. It also needs to be EXTREMELY pure. I know of one naval nuclear reactor technician who commented that 1 part per million of contaminants in the water loop was 2 parts too many.
Yes, we moved away from steam engines
@@johns5504 Steam turbines is the most common way of converting heat to motion, so we did not really move away from steam engines, they are just not pistons anymore.
I like this even if it's just for the lack of pressurized refrigerant. Even when the refrigerating vapor is relatively safe for the environment, you still have to rely on a system staying leak-free and under pressure for years. Having something that relies on what seem to be fancy springs and coils sounds like it should be stable for way longer.
Awesome to learn of a "new" technology coming to light. As said, the COP is of the unit not the conversion. A bigger fish in the pond is how do we use this energy more efficiently, as "any" technology can plug into a building envelope. We need as much attention in the design of buildings and how the HVAC is integrated then anything. No matter what the COP is on any unit 3 or 20. If the building it is placed in is not designed efficiently, what does the COP matter? As the latter much harder to tackle, I think I will work on that and let any "technology" plug into my building.
Sounds freaking cool to me.
😂
After 15 years of research in magnetocalorics i moved on. Cool academic multi physics field. I wouldn’t hold my breath for many many years to come.
Yes I would consider buying it.
I believe we will see it first in portable refrigerators, then residential, then commercial.
The presenter and subject matter aside, I am compelled to highly compliment the designer of Undecided’s logo’s. For whatever my lone opinion is worth, (and in my near eight years) it is the most intuitive logo I have ever seen.
*logos
It would be interesting to see the theoretical efficiency of this refrigeration cycle against the usual liquid-vapor ones
I'm thinking about a design where you have lots of wires and two plates on an axle which keeps the plates at the same distance. The wires go through holes in the plates. You can then turn the plates to add tension to the wires. That would allow for a lot of wires and a simple mechanic to use them.
The 200 W demonstrator you mentioned is equivalent to about 682 BTU/hr, or around 0.05 Tons of cooling. My house has about 3 tons installed, and for a lot of commercial installations I engineer, we put in around 15-30 tons.
I understand this is just the prototype stage, but I'm skeptical to put it lightly. I'd place a lot more hope in magnetic cooling than this tech.
Interesting and novel, it sure is. But capable of operating at a large scale for years and decades? Unlikely any time soon.
I’ve never seen such a clear explanation before. Thank you
I wish I could get in touch with some of these experts to talk about its use in portable cooling options, like making a cooling suit, or a handheld AC unit. Imagine one of those handheld fans that blows actual cold air, rather than just moving air around.
NiTi is a very good thermal conductor. If you put stress in load section of the wire and leave other section always relieved, the relieved part will transfer heat into load section. Now, if the relieved part has a big cooling fan, when you relieve the stress form load section, the heat that it absorbed to return the shape would transfer into fan section and it could blow heat away. So theoretically, the maximum COP it this configuration must be the same as air cooled system.
You didn't notice the heat from the wire you demonstrated because you still have a long wire left before it reaches your hand. But, I played with dental NiTi with d=0.1mm and L=50mm, heating with a small lighter at one tip and holding it at another tip, it burned my finger when it came back to shape.
So i saw the "thing" at 14:22 and thought:
Maybe the best design would be like a double-ring-system, where the two rings are connected with elastomeric compounds, but the inner ring can be adjusted to get very slightly off-center to create a stretch for the material on one side and a chill site on the other side. You then can use a 2 way system to exchange the heat to the environment via a fluid and to exchange the less-heat to the chamber which has to be cooled.
But i think there would be a problem with the separation of the 2 sides because the 2 rings are changing the sides constantly. So you probably end up with the same problems, a Wankel or Liquid Piston Engine encountered during its development.
If I need coolant to transport the cold, I see a combined technology here. The air compressed by the compressor is expanded over the deformed, heated metal while the metal is bent back where it cools down itself. This could achieve a very efficient low level of cold. Very exciting topic.
Considering how often I need to top up the refrigerant in my car or home central air system a refrigerant free system is definitely desirable. IF it's comparably efficient, similar in size and weight for performance, and not dramatically more expensive. It's unlikely to get there right away after the first commercial devices hit the market, that's why we call it the "early adopter cost".
@@darthhodges If the refrigerant needs to be topped up, the system is broken and you are fixing the symptom rather than the actual issue. It should be a closed system, needing topping up is an indication that there's a leak, for the performance of the system, the environment and cost, the leak should be identified and fixed, at which point there shouldn't be any further need to top-up.
@@dantucny No system is perfectly closed. And often the time and expertise needed to find and repair the leak is more expensive than topping it up every other year.
@@darthhodgesyes they are. They are perfectly closed. The loss is from molecules penetrating the permeable coolant path. The same way a dog can smell drugs through anything. The same way a latex balloon loses air. It should last a very long time if there are no leaks.
When you first mentioned caloric cooling I got a mental picture of my fridge raiding it's contents to power itself - made me chuckle to think of coming home to an empty fridge with a note saying sorry 🤣
This would be cool for mini fridges, as it would be more efficient than peltiers. For larger fridges I imagine the existing designs would still be more practical.
I fast-forwarded through most of this video, so I don't know if this was addressed: FWIU this system requires the area being heated to be adjacent to the one being cooled. Systems using refrigerant are easy to extend, able to separate the two areas. If you don't have an easy place to mount both functions together you'll still need some sort of liquid system with a radiator to pump the heat in or out. At which point using a refrigerant and adding a compressor is actually a simpler solution.
1:55 1 liter of water, not 1 gram
One calorie is the energy required to raise the temperature of 1 cm^3 (1 gram, 1 milliliters) of water 1 degree Celsius. One Kcal also called a Calorie is the energy required for 1000cm^3 (1kg or 1 liter) to rise 1 degree C*. Human food is described in Kcals (Calories) not calories.
I work HVAC and like to think of refrigerant as a heat sponge, squeeze it and heat comes out, release it and it soaks up heat
I definitely be interested in a refrigerator that uses this material as a cooling method. I hope the research continues!
I think you are right about him reading the books. Thanks for the video and digging into the whole theory of things.
Hey! RE 20 Black! Nice choice of mic! I always love seeing this mic used instead of the ubiquitous SM7B.
Matt, you videos are awesome, and are one of the reasons I did my master's thesis in renewable energy. So thank you.
At the same time, those animated and audible chapter transition inserts are not helping with the floor and quickly became subjectively annoying
Whole Earth Index's Softech magazine used to write about Nitinol back in the 70s. They were a weird hippy/hacker version of do it yourself environmentalism.
“Soft Tech is a term we’ve used and defended since the late sixties. Soft signifies that something is alive, resilient, adaptive, maybe even lovable.”
More prosaically I could see this being used in a CPU heatsink.