Scientists have invented a completely new cooling method

We will intro­duce the Iono­ral Chiller as a safer and more envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly way to reduce mercury.

A typ­i­cal refrig­er­a­tion sys­tem car­ries heat out of a space with a gas that cools as it expands over a dis­tance. Although this process is effi­cient, some of the gas­es used are par­tic­u­lar­ly harm­ful to the environment.

How­ev­er, there is more than one way to force a mate­r­i­al to absorb and expel ther­mal energy.

A new method, devel­oped by researchers at the Lawrence Berke­ley Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, states that ener­gy is stored and released when mat­ter changes phase, such as when sol­id ice turns into liq­uid water. It uti­lizes the fact that

If you raise the tem­per­a­ture of a block of ice, it will melt. What we don’t often see is that when it melts, it absorbs heat from its sur­round­ings and cools down.

One way to melt ice with­out adding heat is to add a few charged par­ti­cles, or ions. A clas­sic exam­ple is the use of salt on roads to pre­vent freezing.

Ion­ic ther­mal cycles also use salts to change the phase of the flu­id and cool the surroundings.

“The cool­ing water prob­lem remains unsolved,” says Drew Lil­ly, a mechan­i­cal engi­neer at Lawrence Berke­ley Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry in California.

“No one has suc­ceed­ed in devel­op­ing an alter­na­tive solu­tion that cools, works effi­cient­ly, is safe and does not harm the environment.”

“Iono-Catholic Cycle believes that if done prop­er­ly, it has the poten­tial to achieve all these goals.”

Researchers have mod­eled the the­o­ry of the iono-Catholic cycle and demon­strat­ed that effi­cien­cies can be achieved that match or exceed those of cur­rent refrigerants.

When an elec­tric cur­rent is passed through the mate­r­i­al, the ions con­tained in it move, and the melt­ing point of the mate­r­i­al moves, result­ing in a change in temperature.

Exper­i­ments were also con­duct­ed using iodine sodi­um salt to dis­solve eth­yl­ene car­bon­ate. It is a com­mon organ­ic sol­vent that is also used in lithi­um-ion bat­ter­ies, and is man­u­fac­tured by adding car­bon dioxide.

This would not only result in a GWP (Glob­al Warm­ing Poten­tial) of zero, but it could also be negative.

Exper­i­ments have mea­sured a tem­per­a­ture change of 25 degrees (45 degrees Fahren­heit) with a charge of less than 1 volt, a result that sur­pass­es oth­er heat­ing tech­nolo­gies to date.