New material makes cooling devices more energy-efficient
April 10, 2018, Kiel University
Waste heat from industry can often not be utilised because of its low temperature. With this material, it can be used in environmentally friendly cooling systems for example in the field of building technology. The research team from Kiel will present its material and its applications at the Hannover Messe 2018.
Cooling devices are considered to be power guzzlers, in which polluting refrigerants are still used, even after the ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). An environmentally friendly alternative are systems which use water instead. A research team at the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry at Kiel University, together with the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE in Freiburg, has developed a highly-porous material, with which these cooling systems can be operated using less electrical energy than before. Previously-unused waste heat, e.g. from district heating systems, data centres, or heat from solar thermal collectors could be used for that. The results have been published recently in the journal Advanced Materials.
Read more at:
https://phys.org/news/2018-04-material-cooling-devices-energy-efficient.html#jCp
