Barocalorics is a really important field right now. I don’t actually think this category of tech is bullshit based on the core research I’ve been following.

Maybe this particular startup is, but the field is actually ready for a breakthrough. We need startups to take the risk of doing an initial manufacturing run or nothing will ever happen.

You’re gonna feel real silly when you look around and see the rest of us all squeezing our new refrigerators to keep our groceries cold.

angry Midwestern noises

Yes. You are always adding net energy to the system. That’s why a heater is a self-contained unit (turns energy into heat) while an air conditioner requires two units- one to suck up the heat outside, another to reject that heat outside. It’s not ‘creating cold’, it’s using energy to pump heat from the inside to the outside. The total amount of heat rejected outside is a net addition- it’s the heat sucked up from inside, plus the waste heat from the compressor.

The air conditioner (current design) works on the simple principle that the boiling point of a liquid changes based on ambient pressure, and that phase change (between liquid and gas) carries a lot of latent energy. To boil water with heat alone, it takes about 100 calories to heat a gram of water from just above freezing to just below boiling. But to boil it, to heat it less than one more degree and turn it into gas, takes another 433 calories. That means if you adjust its boiling point by pressurizing and depressurizing it, whenever it boils or condenses it’ll suck up or release a lot of heat at the same time.

Obviously we want colder than 100c, so we use a refrigerant like tetrafluoroethane with a boiling point of -26c.

This gadget uses a similar concept. Instead of using pressure to tweak the boiling point of a refrigerant, it uses a solid that heats or cools in response to pressure. Then water carries the heat around.

Squeezing (pressurizing) certain gases are basically how air conditioners work. Under pressure, the gases can absorb more heat (think pressure cooker - those get hotter because they raise the boiling point of water with the higher pressure). Shuffle that pressurized gas somewhere else with lower pressure, and it can no longer hold all that heat and needs to release it. Tada: heat has been moved from one location to another.

The only hint in the article is that it’s going to be an organic substance as a plastic crystal. Their website claims that it’s a powder whose elemental composition is exclusively carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. The difficult and expensive materials are likely to be limited to synthesis equipment and catalysts, with petrochemicals used to synthesize the actual refrigerant.

Probably petrochemicals.

“Oh, a hug? That’s cool That cools I guess…”

That’s a phase change triggered by a seed crystal (generated from a physical shock from the ‘clicker’) where the transition from liquid to solid phases returns the latent heat that was previously added to turn it from solid to liquid.

There is no phase change in this material, it remains a solid and changes temperature depending on how much pressure is applied to it.

Plastic as in plastic deformation, not plastic as in milk jugs. The crystals have a weak molecular bond so can squash and deform.

Not until it’s a real thing that actually exists. As of now, it’s just some imaginary bullshit to get investors excited…