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New thermogalvanic tech paves way for more efficient fridges
- westurner 2y ago"Solvation entropy engineering of thermogalvanic electrolytes for efficient electrochemical refrigeration" (2025) https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(25)00003-0 https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(25)00003-0
- ChuckMcM 2y agoThanks for that, it's great that its 10x better than the previous best effort. It's notable that it needs to get 20x better again before it starts to have useful applications :-).
- westurner 2y agoSomeday maybe! Quantum thermal diodes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42537703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42537703 From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38861468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38861468 : > Laser cooling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cooling > Cooling with LEDs in reverse: https://issuu.com/designinglighting/docs/dec_2022/s/17923182 https://issuu.com/designinglighting/docs/dec_2022/s/17923182 : > "Near-field photonic cooling through control of the chemical potential of photons" (2019) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0918-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0918-8
- ChuckMcM 2y agoHigh hopes, low expectations :-). That said, 'quantum thermal diode' sounds like something that breaks on your space ship and if you don't fix it you won't be able to get the engines online to outrun the aliens. Even after reading the article I think the unit of measure there should be milli-demons in honor of Maxwell's Demon.
- mdorazio 2y agoIf you're interested in going down a rabbit hole, other thermo tech that always seems to be right around the corner of practicality: thermoacoustic chillers, magnetocaloric fridges.
- wbl 2y agoMagnetocaloric cooling is used in cryogenics as are thermoacoustic chillers. I think there are some aerospace applications.
- yencabulator 2y agoUltrasonic vibration "fans": https://www.pcworld.com/article/2203172/frore-system-airjet-how-the-pc-fan-of-the-future-works.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2203172/frore-system-airjet-...
- csours 2y agoSomething I've wondered about recently - often times in a kitchen you want hot water and a cold box for food - and lately there are heat pump water heaters available on the market. Is there a fridge/water heater combo yet?
- Avamander 2y agoThere's not enough heat in the fridge to heat up any significant amount of water. I would however like to see that waste heat being used for something like dishwashers or just being vented out (instead of into the room that might have to be actively cooled).
- nimish 2y agoAny heat used is better than no heat used. Water heaters that are also AC units do exist (a heat pump is an ac run backwards)
- bongodongobob 2y agoNo it's not. Claiming heat from a fridge would be like grabbing a cup of water for a minute a few times a day. The extra shit that needs to be manufactured and transported is surely not worth the effort at all.
- cameldrv 2y agoI wouldn’t be surprised if someone starts making these. The heat that comes off a typical refrigerator is enough to heat about 1/3 of a typical house’s hot water usage.
- bongodongobob 2y agoWhat?? Not even close.
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- ggm 2y ago10x Improvements in this kind of effect don't happen very often. I'm wondering if a chain of these can "pump" coolth uphill, or if it can be used alongside other methods.
- AtlasBarfed 2y agoYeah am I reading that? 1.7 degrees Celsius is what they've achieved? That paves the way for more efficient refrigerators? I thought paving the way meant a clear path to the end goal, because you already know the route and all the necessary engineering to get there.
- ggm 2y agoPromo gotta pro mo' But upping the effect from 0.1c to 1.7c is pretty good. I doubt there's a lot more to come from this, so i doubt the path finding too.
- idunnoman1222 2y agoIf we cared about making refrigerators more efficient, we would just put the heat exchanger outside or better yet underground
- nextos 2y agoAFAIK, that's how lots of restaurants keep their stock chilled, at least in my area. They have relatively noisy exchangers outside connected to their fridges that are indoors.
- econ 2y agoImagine heat pumps 400+% efficient with 60% heat to electric conversion. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_thermoelectric_energy_converter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_thermoelectric_energ...
- calmbonsai 2y agoThat's actually commonly done in industrial cooling applications with rapid turnover (think dockside food storage warehouses), but it's not practical for the heat output of domestic units. Even in parts of Europe and Iceland with ready access to a common municipal heat exchange, household refrigerators don't have have enough heat output to justify the infrastructure. The typical domestic fridge just needs to "get cold once" and the remainder of its duty-cycle (aside from the rare holiday feast or party) it's just trickle-cooling.
- bityard 2y agoDepends on where you are. Where I live, it's cold seven months out of the year so keeping the resultant heat inside the house lowers the heating bill somewhat. I've always wished for a fridge that was mounted to an exterior wall. In the summer, it operates like a normal fridge but with the condenser coil outside of the house. In the winter, the compressor system turns off when the outside temp goes below a certain value and little door/shutters with fans regulate the temperature of the refrigerator either by letting in cold air from outside (if the interior needs to be colder) or from the inside (if the interior needs to be warmer to prevent food from freezing). There's probably a few good reasons why this is not actually practical but I'm tempted to try something like it in retirement.
- swayvil 2y agoI think we're using 100 year old technology. Compressors and stuff. Whatever happened to acoustic cooling? Did peltiers ever get efficient?
- tommiegannert 2y ago> Did peltiers ever get efficient? Not compared to gas compression. For a relaxed take on it: https://youtu.be/CnMRePtHMZY?si=jusDm81RWkDF_HJ0&t=900 https://youtu.be/CnMRePtHMZY?si=jusDm81RWkDF_HJ0&t=900 (Thermoelectric cooling: it's not great) Though part of the complaints about the mini fridge is due to lack of insulation. But he compares it to his usual fridge, which has a similar power draw as this 60W mini fridge, and there's a 50x difference in volume to cool.
- sergiotapia 2y agoWhat do you make of this guys? https://x.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1884477625084830006 https://x.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1884477625084830006 It seems like older fridges worked really really well and last a long time.
- Brybry 2y agoEven if true, no one is going back to an R-12 refrigerant because CFCs contributed to a hole in the ozone layer that the entire world agreed was a bad thing. [1] The "last a long time" bit might be survivorship bias. They might last a long time (or not) but having one old working fridge does not prove reliability. As far as I know, there was no ban on using old fridges and I don't think people usually throw away major appliances that work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
- AngryData 2y agoThey did often use better refrigerant back in the day, but it is refrigerant we don't use now because it is either highly poisonous or hell on the ozone layer. The compressor itself wasn't often all that efficient mechanically, but the good refrigerant helps make up for it, but also there is only so much to gain out of compressor efficiency. The biggest problem with old fridges is they were insulated like absolute garbage. Not only is the insulation often super thin, but the steel shell on the inside was rarely separated from the steel shell on the outside leading to a lot of heat transfer. So even with it closed they ran constantly almost like you did have the door open all the time. You also have to consider its cooling capacity, you only need a little bit of cooling 95% of the time, but when you put fresh groceries in it or water in the fridge, until those are cooled down they are heating up everything else in the fridge and so stuff will spoil faster/easier. Some older fridges might take a long time to cool everything down if you put in more than a single item at a time. But really, most fridge breakdowns are not because of a compressor failure or anything major, 99% of the time it is some simple electronic component. A simple bad capacitor can prevent your fridge compressor from kicking in. Or a thermocouple could go bad and not tell it to turn on when it should. Both of those parts cost like $2 to produce, but of course they choose more proprietary designs and configurations to make a generic fix more difficult which lets them markup the parts on prices. Which has the side effect of convincing more people to just buy new because they don't know if the 1500% marked up proprietary part was the only part near failure, and they don't have the knowledge or confidence to start tinkering on their refrigerator before they lose all their potential savings on spoiled food, or use an appliance repairman who will add on $200+ onto the inflated parts prices because they don't want the liability taken upon themselves if they were not using direct replacement parts.
- AngryData 2y agoIt is going to be pretty hard to beat the efficiency of phase-change heat pumps. And I hope it is more powerful than merely being able to keep a home fridge cool, because they already don't use all that much power unless it is absolutely ancient. This is great stuff to research, but trying to market them for potentially slightly more efficient refrigerators seems like going for the highest fruit on the tree.