Breakthrough Heat Pump Works In the MOST Unusual Way…

heat pumps have changed the world everything from Air Conditioning ice cream and refrigerators wouldn't be possible without them but for other benefits they've had problems too early heat pumps use refrigerants that could harm the ozone layer and while we fixed that there are still some other challenges left to figure out that's why when I heard about this research happening at the University of California Berkeley go Bears I was really excited using a technology called Ayano caloric cooling they think they might have just figured out the future of heat pumps so how exactly does it work and what does it mean for you and I and our homes and our electric bills let's find out I'm Ricky and this is stupid DaVinci [Music] this video is brought to you by bright sellers this was the winning topic from our last Community poll voted on by you the viewer so be sure to subscribe and vote on future videos so you can decide what we make next most refrigeration systems used to use ozone destroying chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs as liquid refrigerants until the Montreal protocol banned their use thanks to this agreement today's cooling systems use hydrofluorocarbons instead or hfcs they don't harm the ozone layer but they're extremely powerful greenhouse gases in fact they're over 2 000 times stronger than carbon dioxide but 2050 hfc emissions are predicted to account for up to 20 percent of equivalent CO2 emissions because of the rapidly growing demand for refrigeration worldwide so to tackle all these new challenges countries have agreed to phase out hfcs as well under the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal protocol which the U.S ratified in September of 2022. the question then is what do we replace hfcs with other liquid-based alternative such as hydrofluorothans or hfos have lower global warming potential however they're flammable less efficient more expensive and pose other environmental concerns that's why researchers have been looking for solid state materials that can provide a refrigeration effect without using any gases at all for years it makes so much sense no gases no greenhouse effect these solids are called caloric materials they can absorb or release heat when we expose them to strong force fields for example some heat up with strong magnetic fields or Magneto caloric materials others with pressure Barrow caloric materials and so on they're pretty awesome for example nitinol is a nickel titanium alloy that Nasa uses on the Mars rover this metal is elasto caloric which means it heats up when stretched and cools down when relaxed however even these caloric materials have major flocks they often require large field strengths that are difficult and expensive to generate they also have low coefficients of performance or cop which means you need to put in a lot more energy to get a little bit of cooling or heating power out of it also their temperature changes very little when they change phase in short they're great for the environment it kind of suck for cooling this is where the big breakthrough comes in there's a new type of cooling technology called the iono caloric cooling cycle that promises to change Refrigeration for good but before get into that let me tell you about our sponsor this week right sellers it's wine delivery day boom there's no right way to drink wine oh look at that I love having a nice collection of wines for when we have guests but I'm far from a sommelier with Bryce sellers you don't have to be just sign up and join the nearly 3 million people who've taken the seven question quiz to tailor your selection choose from 12 different plan options and get 100 plus varietals sourced from 80 plus wine regions delivered right to your doorstep each box comes with wine education cards for each bottle that outlines tasting notes suggested pairings best serving temperatures and Origins finally rate your wines and improve your future matches my bright seller subscription makes me feel like a wine Whisperer without wandering aimlessly in the wine aisle thanks to price sellers for giving our viewers a limited time offer for 100 off their first subscription and a free wine tote click the link in the description and take the quiz and get started today huge thanks to Bright Sellers and you for supporting the show so what is Ayano Keller Cooling and how does it work well it's a new type of caloric cooling invented by a research team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab it uses a salt instead of force fields to freeze and melt a solid this works just like adding salt to a frozen Road during the winter the salt has ions that dissolve into the ice lowering its melting temperature and making it melt as it melts the ice absorbs heat from the surroundings and the surroundings get colder the cooling effect Drew Lily and Ruby pressure from lbnl figured that if they could get the salt back out of the refrigerant they could reverse the process and make it freeze again releasing the heat somewhere else and that's how they invented the iono caloric cooling cycle which is simply a heat pump powered by salt and electricity ionic color cooling needs two things refrigerant and a salt the refrigerant is a compound called ethylene carbonate EC and it's mixed with sodium iodide Nal salt this choice of material has several benefits of a traditional hfc refrigeration systems ethylene carbonate is a cheap and stable very safe organic compound but is commonly used as an additive in battery electrolyte so it's readily available for mass production sodium iodide is also a common and cheap and completely harmless salt the EC Nal mixture has some unique properties that make it ideal for iono caloric cooling first pure AC melts at 36.4 degrees Celsius so it's a solid room temperature when mixed with sodium iodide it forms a special mixture that freezes at 6.4 degrees Celsius this melting and freezing transition absorb and release lots of heat making it great for heat pumps second when you add the salt to the pure EC its temperature drops by as much as 30 degrees third compared to other caloric materials it can produce more cooling or heating power for a given amount of material so you can make refrigeration systems lighter with ionic caloric than you can with other caloric materials now I know what you're thinking how does it compare to my current HVAC system I hear you I have the exact same question and we'll get back to that in just a minute fourth both materials are environmentally friendly safe non-toxic non-flammable and have zero global warming potential in fact ethylene carbonate is actually carbon negative since you can make it with carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere so it's kind of a win-win all around the Iona color cycle works very similarly to a normal AC which uses something called a vapor compression cycle here's how a traditional refrigeration cycle works as you have liquids going through the expansion valve the pressure drops and as a result it's forced to become a gas doing so makes this side cooler as the heat is absorbed by the liquid as it turns into a gas so you have the cold side and as this low pressure Vapor then goes to a compressor think like an air compressor in your house to pump up your tire that pressure is increased and as the pressure increases and it goes to the condenser it is forced back into a liquid state and releases the heat on this side so fundamentally the key difference here is that the iono caloric cooling Loop operates by changing the melting point by introducing salt lowering the melting point and then removing the salt and raising it back up this is different from the traditional HVAC heater AC you have in your house that operates by changing the pressure as you change the pressure of this working fluid you'll either be in a different state gas or liquid depending on the temperature at that pressure so that's how it works let's get into details of the different steps involved first the EC refrigerant is mixed with sodium iodide the salt making a slurry mixture like adding salt to ice then the slurry is pumped into a melter that's the place where you want to cool down let's say the inside of a fridge or your room there the EC melts as it absorbs heat lowering the temperature the third step is desalination Yes you heard that correctly where the process is reversed we use electricity to force ions out of the solution and get the pure easy liquid refrigerant back then the liquid EC is pumped to the hot side the outside of the fridge for example where it freezes releasing the heat to the environment so as long as you keep the pumps and desalination going this cycle happens again and again constantly extracting heat from one side and releasing it on the other a basic heat pump the Cycles biggest breakthrough however is how the researchers accomplished the desalination step they use a technique called electrodealysis which uses electricity to push ions through a special type of membrane this technique requires a very low voltage of just 0.22 volts this is nothing compared to the high fields that other caloric materials require for example Magneto caloric devices use a very strong magnetic field upwards of five Teslas to put that into context the strongest permanent neodymium magnets generate less than a third of that electrocaloric devices use electric fields of up to 2 million volts per meter which can only be generated by applying thousands of volts across micrometer sized films elasto clerk devices like nitinol use stresses of up to 800 megapascals which is almost three times the strength needed to permanently Bend steel so this is easy peasy in comparison making it way more efficient than all the rest okay so granted this new tech is better than the other caloric materials but I bet you're wondering how does it compare in terms of performance to the AC that I already have in my house right now that's the thing I was thinking as well so let's get into the numbers the research team says they achieved a relative coefficient of performance or rcop of 29.5 or 0.3 so rcop equals 0.3 now if you know anything about heat pump efficiencies and cops that doesn't sound very good but there's a catch that's the relative performance compared to the maximum theoretical performance not the actual cop since the relative cop is 29.5 that means that the real cop is 2.75 which means that for every one kilowatt electricity you put in you can actually move 2.75 kilowatts of heat around okay so how does it compare to your home AC the average cop of a normal compression cycle Ace unit is between 2.3 and 3.5 so the iono caloric cycle is right there alongside your traditional AC but the technology is not without its flaws and challenges the biggest challenge is to increase the cooling power density which measures How much cooling or heating power is produced per unit of volume of refrigerant the current ionic caloric device has a cooling power density of just 6 watts per liter this is because of the high resistance in the ion exchange membrane of the desalinator you know what I told you about this sort of filters out the ions to desolate the refrigerant a typical home AC uses three pounds of hfc refrigerant per ton of cooling which is equivalent to 12 000 BTUs or 3517 watts per liter to get the same cooling power with an iono caloric system running at 6 watts per liter we'd need almost 600 liters or 800 kilograms of ethylene carbonate plus around 300 kilograms of sodium iodide so it would be massive to say the very least holding over a ton of refrigerant mixture another challenge is to optimize the thermodynamic cycle improve the efficiency and performance of iono caloric cooling even though the cop of 2.75 isn't that bad bad it'll be a hard sell to convince anyone to switch from an AC heating system that will raise their energy build by almost 30 percent or by as much as 80 compared to a good geothermal heat pump with a cop of five so for this technology to really have a shot several key things have to fall in place for example we don't know how well the small experimental apparatus will work when made bigger what challenges will come up when deployed on a commercial scale how much the system will cost and so much more unless it can compete in price and performance against other proven Technologies it'll be hard for consumers like you and me to make the switch at the current cooling power density cost is also a major issue ethylene carbonate costs on average of 2 712 dollars per ton or about 1.20 per pound sodium iodide costs around 15 per pound so 800 kilograms of VC plus 300 kilograms of Nal would run almost twelve thousand dollars and that's for the refrigerant alone so needless to say until we get the power density up to a manageable level where we need much less refrigerant there's no possible way that this will ever compete with traditional AC either way the future of Ayano caloric cooling so far does look promising most if not all these challenges can be engineered and solved the problem with cooling power is that the ethylene carbonate is an organic electrolyte but the ion exchange membrane is a researchers used are made and optimized for water or aqueous Solutions what we need is more research into membranes for organic electrolytes if we can get those membranes to work with EC as well as they do for water we could potentially increase power density by a factor of a hundred in fact a new type of rigid membrane already increased ion flow rates five-fold over the best conventional membranes like the ones that researchers used so overall we could be looking at an increase of around 500 times the cooling power density reaching 3000 watts per liter of refrigerant this would bring the total weight down to just 1.8 kilograms or about four pounds of EC salt mixed and the cost of the refrigerant to a measly 24 dollars that's about a fourth of the lowest you'd pay to recharge your AC unit now since it's solid this one won't Escape into the atmosphere so probably not a lot of replenishing involved but those are highly theoretical numbers and in my opinion that would be the target 3 000 watts per liter in order for this to be competitive until then I don't think most people will be willing to make the switch pay more money go to an unproven technology when they already have Heating and Cooling pretty well sorted out with traditional refrigerants ultimately for this to be a commercial success it's going to have to win on cost like all things solar an electric vehicle will not win because of mandates I think ultimately they'll win on cost and what's really interesting about this is you can't make cold right you can make heat you can burn wood you can run a resistive heater but you can't make cold all you can do is move heat around so there's really no alternative in a way to the heat pump but the way we power it is something that we can continually refine and improve now if you thought that was interesting I would love for you to check out this video on heat pumps next

Channel: Two Bit da Vinci

Views: 207,263

Keywords: two bit da vinci, heat pumps, how does a heat pump work, energy efficiency, ionocaloric cooling, ionocaloric heat pump, ionocaloric heating and cooling, iono-caloric heat pump, geothermal heating and cooling, heat pump, heatpumps, saving money on ac, saving money on cooling, staying cool this summer, heat pumps explained, how does a heat pump work physics, Genius Cooling Tech Saves You $$, But You Won't Believe How..., Breakthrough Heat Pump Can Save 50% on Cooling This Summer

Id: e8fDMKr77bA

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 01 2023