A startup founded by a material physicist has been working for the past seven years to change the way we cool our food and interior spaces, and it's now taken a big step toward that goal.
Here's the short version: instead of an ozone-depleting substance that can leak out and cause enormous damage to the environment, Barocal is developing a class of solid materials that can absorb and transfer heat when subjected to pressure, with a high degree of efficiency and safety. Expect to see these in action in refrigerators and air conditioning systems.
TechCrunch reported the company, founded by University of Cambridge professor Xavier Moya, has just raised US$10 million to commercialize its solution. That's on top of the $4.5 million in funding it had previously received from the European Innovation Council and a $1 million prize in the TERA-Award energy solutions competition, so this fresh injection will likely help accelerate its efforts.
To understand Barocal's approach, let's first look at how refrigeration works. Today's fridges circulate a liquid refrigerant (typically a greenhouse gas) through coils inside the fridge's cold compartment. As it evaporates into a gas, it absorbs heat from the food and air around it, cooling the interior. The refrigerant gas is drawn into a compressor, which pressurizes and heats it. The hot pressurized gas flows through coils on the back of the fridge, where a fan helps dissipate the heat to the outside air. As it cools, the gas condenses back into a liquid, and this passes through an expansion valve which reduces pressure, and it then flows back to the evaporator coils. The cycle then repeats in this loop.
Barocal is working on an inexpensive solid-state refrigerant in the form of plastic crystals which have molecules freely rotating inside them at rest, and can absorb heat in that state – and their temperature can stably vary by 90 ºF (50 ºC).
When they're compressed, the molecules stop rotating, and the crystals give off heat. Transferring heat out from a fridge can be achieved by flowing water past the material toward a radiator where said heat can dissipate.
It's basically the barocaloric effect at work – hence the firm's name. This could negate the need to use greenhouse gases for cooling, which can not only cause outsized global warming effects when they leak out, but are also energy inefficient and require plenty of electricity (used in your refrigerator's compressor).
It's worth noting that Moya and his team aren't the only ones working on this tech. AFP noted last year that several groups are developing cooling solutions along these lines, and we covered a Harvard team working on this back in 2022. In fact, the University of Cambridge had a program focused on this for 15 years before Barocal formed.
If this company can stick the landing, it could pave the way for massive reductions in energy demand for cooling, as well as the elimination of those nasty greenhouse gases from the billions of refrigerators and air conditioners the world is going to need in the coming decades.
Barocal is presently exploring the application of its waxy solid refrigerant in commercial-grade HVAC and refrigeration systems. Beyond developing the material, there's a lot of engineering required to make these cooling systems compact, efficient, cost-effective, and quiet.
The company noted last year it was trialing its tech with multiple international companies, and aimed to have a product out within three years, so hopefully we're not in for a long wait before we can experience the fridge of the future.
Source: Barocal via TechCrunch
