12 ms·
Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling
Related: https://www.jhuapl.edu/news/news-releases/250521-apl-thermoelectrics-enable-compressor-free-cooling https://www.jhuapl.edu/news/news-releases/250521-apl-thermoe...
- SchemaLoad 1y agoThis article uses the term AI 5 times to talk about basic microcontroller sensor readings.
- boodleboodle 1y agoThat my friend is the Korean Way (^tm). If they don’t meet the minimum AI namedrop quota, Seocho Samsung HQ rejects the proposal.
- bgnn 1y agoWe used to call any sensor with a digital output a smart sensor, although there was nothing smart about it. Now that smart became AI.
- cactusfrog 1y agoMy process control theory textbook has a chapter on neural networks and a lot of the language in control theory has an AI like tinge to it. I think this AI language is native to control theory so it might not be as overblown as it first sounds.
- Onavo 1y agoI mean yes, that's what reinforcement learning is.
- raxxorraxor 1y agoI always thought my software PID controller with 512kb main memory is quite smart. Pure AI in my opinion.
- eru 1y agoThat's quite a lot of memory for a little PID controller, isn't it? But I guess these days, they already only cost pennies, so you wouldn't save much from going for even less memory?
- raxxorraxor 1y agoIt is a serious PID controller using an intelligent AI ringbuffer. But yeah, 512kb was probably vastly exaggerated... 512 bytes is probably enough :)
- fourthark 1y agoA thermostat is a cybernetic device.
- Hackbraten 1y agoSo we need both AI and Kubernetes.
- romantomjak 1y agoIndependently scale and deploy fridges at edge. Fridge@Edge ™
- moffkalast 1y agoSuck it, Jian Yang
- Incipient 1y agoEdge devices are problematic. I want to outsource the risk and decrease capex (and just hope opex works out). CloudFridge.
- throwaway915 1y agoCloud involves losing sovereignty of data. And rabbits. Local Automated Refrigeration Devices Eat Rabbits. LARDER.
- anakaine 1y agoWe're going to need decrease load and off-shift the munchies so the fridge doesnt crash. Can we use a CDN? Comestible distribution network.
- JTbane 1y agosorry, us-west-1 went down for 6 hours and my milk spoiled
- 1y ago
- amelius 1y agoHuh, control theorists always try to rigorously prove the stability and performance of their algorithms. AI seems to be the opposite of that: just let the black box solve it and don't worry about any problems, we'll just add more training data if they happen!
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoYes! Let's spend 100x the resources on AI to do what a PID controller or Kalman filter can do.
- ethbr1 1y agoI’m less scared about 100x the resources (in most applications) in exchange for decreasing programmer time / need. What worries me far more is the lack of formalism around risk / boundary cases by undertrained teams using modern AI solutions. Anyone building on top of a thing should either understand (a) how it’s built in detail or (b) its specifications and behavior in detail. Most of these teams understand neither about LLMs.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago>Most of these teams understand neither about LLMs. That's where my 100x comes from, not from the dev effort but from the debugging of issues of an unknown black box.
- jameshart 1y agoIf you type ‘fuzzy logic’ in to google the autocomplete suggested search is ‘fuzzy logic rice cooker’. Control theory has been stealing ML terminology for a long time.
- ethbr1 1y ago:D Rice cooker marketing is weirdly synchronized on that. Speaking of, what does it actually mean? That the cooker isn’t using a timer? Do most of them run off weight + time + heat response logic?
- bee_rider 1y agoI firmly believe control theory folks didn’t invent LLMs only because the idea of doing a big fit on everything sounds too much like a joke they were telling each other.
- Quitschquat 1y agoI kinda of gave up after the second mention.
- looofooo0 1y ago"We used copilot to hack the code together."
- avhception 1y agoMy parent's new fridge has the word AI printed on at least 5 of the stickers that were plastered all over the thing.
- qart 1y agoJust a few years ago, the buzzwords were "germicidal", "immunity boosting", "anti-bacterial", etc. for every damn thing, especially in India, where marketing can get away with bizarre claims.
- GuB-42 1y agoIs there anything that is proved to be "immunity boosting" apart from vaccines? Well, and germs of course. Germs will cause an immune response, but that's probably not the kind of "boost" you are interested in. As for AI, I guess it is sufficiently vague and also not a medical claim, so you can put it everywhere. But because it is just as vague for consumers, is it even worth something for marketing?
- colechristensen 1y agoDepends on your definition of "boosting". Vitamin C is essential for plenty of immune functions and a deficiency has serious effects on immunity. Enormous doses of Vitamin C have been shown to be effective in various scenarios as well. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8239596/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8239596/
- bluGill 1y agoWhile not wrong, that is very misleading - for the vast majority we already get plenty of vitamin C in our diet and we don't have the specific situations where enormous doses will be effective. At least vitamin C is water soluble: your body will almost always just pee out any extra quick so it is very hard to overdose. Those who have a kidney problem should check with a doctor, for the rest of us massive doses just make our pee more expensive.
- colechristensen 1y ago>for the vast majority we already get plenty of vitamin C This is highly dependent on the population you're talking about. There are plenty of people around the world who don't have great nutrition and don't eat large amounts of fortified industrial food. >for the rest of us massive doses just make our pee more expensive The study I linked reported ridiculous doses of vitamin C "dramatically improved the clinical state and cardiovascular, pulmonary, hepatic and renal function" in ICU spesis patients. Like 200-400 grams of sodium ascorbate administered over 7 hours. The recommended daily nutritional consumption of vitamin C is around 80 milligrams. There are other studies reporting other positive outcomes for large doses of vitamin C. This isn't a recommendation that you should take hundreds of grams every day yourself, but there is ample evidence in a clinical setting for "immune boosting" vitamin C in large doses. (and also criticisms of the daily value for being too low)
- veunes 1y ago"AI" has become the seasoning you sprinkle on anything to make it sound futuristic
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoI wonder if there's a site that keeps track of these. It was crypto before, then ML, for a while a lot of job openings seasoned their text with IoT, etc.
- yehoshuapw 1y agoso long as it isn't about ai based crypto running on IoT, not interested
- keysdev 1y agoIt is the cheese abd soy sauce of computer science now days
- prmoustache 1y agoAI is to software services what avocado is in the food industry.
- thesz 1y ago"AI" has become the seasoning you sprinkle on anything to make it sound contemporary.
- vasco 1y agoBut zero web 2.0 references so we can rejoice.
- maeln 1y agoNah the new buzz was the Web 3, Web 2.0 is sooo 2010
- colechristensen 1y agoWeb 3 was blockchain nonsense "everywhere" and the buzz has died because the only people who want blockchains are speculators, money launderers, and niche boring users like nightly settlement of inter-bank accounts.
- razakel 1y ago"Sorry, your subscription has expired and now all your food is mouldy. If you have any complaints, call 1-800-FUCK-YOU and we'll just laugh at you."
- ggus 1y agoEven worse: If you have any complaints, call a number we won't publish anywhere on our site and a robotic voice will just laugh at you.
- zettabomb 1y agoSo I'm not defending the use of the term AI in this context, however in this case it's part of the product name (for the most part, there's only a few other references). Does the product use anything that would be regarded as properly AI? No idea, but marketing definitely is going to want you to use the Full Product Name(TM) whenever possible.
- throwawayoldie 1y ago> marketing definitely is going to want you to use the Full Product Name(TM) whenever possible Counterpoint: fuck marketing.
- Seb-C 1y agoI purchased a book the other day, and when I turn the pages, it automatically shows me the text that I want to read. It must be powered by AI.
- oneshtein 1y agoIt looks like joke today, but it's not a joke anymore. Book can look at your search history youtube history, or reading history to have insight about your points of interest to create list of topics you like, then generate pages on the fly using LLM.
- TechDebtDevin 1y agoI imagine theres going to be an entire new class of intelligent humans powered by LLMs that learn this way, and they are going to be at such a disadvantage to the people that do it the old fashioned way and dont take shortcuts. The vast majority of humans are going to offload all their critical think skills to LLMs. I dont want to be friends with those people. I want to start a blog about these people called "Artifically Intelligent"
- artursapek 1y agoThey exist already, and are the people who watch a lot of cable TV. They are called NPCs
- TechDebtDevin 1y agoYeah but I believe the internet rescued a lot of people from that existence, but the people running the internet now are actively working against that.
- SecretDreams 1y ago> I dont want to be friends with those people. That really limits the friendship selection pool :(.
- SecretDreams 1y agoHow else would we know they used AI???
- matt3210 1y agoSo PID controllers are AI now? Cool!
- WarOnPrivacy 1y agoI used peltier coolers on K6 processors 1M computer years ago. They worked great and lasted about as long as the PCs did. Not long after I bought mine, they disappeared from cooler offerings. I've wondered what became of the tech.
- PaulHoule 1y agoI remember one objection to Peltier coolers in that application is that could possibly cool the CPU below the dew point and cause water condensation, something a fan can't do.
- rurban 1y agoFor this we calculate the dew point with 2 sensors and react accordingly in my temperature controller. I'd really like to try out these better peltiers, our current ones suck. And the fans to remove the heat are huge and loud.
- PaulHoule 1y agoThere are other ways of building refrigerant-free refrigerators too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetocaloric_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetocaloric_effect and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elastocaloric_materials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elastocaloric_materials of course they also have the dew point problem, but so do ordinary refrigerators and freezers.
- rurban 1y agoI need active CPU and light cooling. Fridges are easy.
- marcusb 1y agoA friend had a Peltier cooler on a late 90s/early 2000s CPU and had the condensation problem. The cooler (or maybe CPU, or both; I can't remember which) had an algae-like growth all over it.
- anticensor 1y agoDid they solve the inefficiency problem of peltiers?
- cosmotic 1y agoThe article says they have made peltiers 75% more efficient than existing ones.
- nine_k 1y agoOK, a typical Peltier device has 3.5% coefficient of performance, that is, it produces 35 W of cooling per 1 kW consumed. Fine, let's expect that the new tech doubles the efficiency, to 7%. Still, to my mind, pretty wasteful, on par with a steam railway engine. A Peltier element is good in cases where you can afford a large heat removal device, but need precise temperature control and no moving parts. For a home fridge, I'll take the sound of the compressor and the temperature fluctuations of a 400% efficient compressor-based heat pump over a Peltier element any day.
- sunshine-o 1y agoWhile Peltier cooling have low efficiency wouldn't it be ideal in some cases like: - energy source is solar, DC already and abundant. - cold climate so the fridge can contribute to heating the room Anyway good to know those small electric cooler with Peltier effect must be consuming a lot electricity.
- jfengel 1y agoA common use case: coolers. You don't want a whole compressor, but you do want to keep your hot dogs safe and your beer drinkable. It's not very efficient but it's enough for short periods.
- AngryData 1y agoThere are mini-compressor based coolers available now if you look for them. They cost a little bit more, and obviously have more weight than a peltier, but I think are worth it if a bag of ice isn't viable by itself because they will run for way longer than a peltier setup.
- BearOso 1y agoAI has literally nothing to do with this. Why do they feel the need to sprinkle the phrase everywhere? AI inverter/compressor? Come on, have some sense of shame, please.
- savrajsingh 1y agoBecause it works wonders on non-technical people
- rcxdude 1y agoIt's the name of the game, alas. In the area I work in, I've seen many companies get many multiples of the investment we've gotten because it's "quantum", even though they're trying to do the same thing we're doing and doing less well at it.
- throwawayoldie 1y agoI assume that if you have "quantum AI", VCs break into your house and force bags of money on you.
- gettingoverit 1y agoActually AI has a lot to do with material design. I can't do a proper explanation, so please bear with this information dump: - We don't have a strong physical theory for solid state physics. Quantum stuff doesn't scale well from 1 atom to a mole of atoms, because 10^23 goes into the exponent of number of energy levels in the system, and then we also have to model interaction of those levels. - Physical properties of materials depend on their crystal structure, unevenness of that structure, spectrum of size of crystals, temperature, pressure, fields they're exposed to and current position of stars in the sky. Even the "wrong" solid state physics equations we have are highly non-linear. - State-of-the-art effects are usually achieved with combinations of such materials. - Exact parameters of the process used to put those materials together radically change the behavior of the system. Put that nanolayer with a different sort of vapor deposition or at different pressure, and the thing will stop working. Ever wondered why we don't produce all the neodymium magnets at N55 grade? Because even precise description of the process is not enough. - AI doesn't care about the exact physics, but is sometimes very good at navigating in the large parameter space. - Google have recently made AI that predicted thousands of novel material structures. They found more materials than were found by all human research over the whole humankind history. I wouldn't expect AI to explain what's going on in solid-state physics anytime soon, but exploring crystal structures, doping, and process parameters automatically might actually get us new materials a couple hundred years faster.
- throwaway81523 1y agoI thought Peltiers can't lower the temperature by more than 40 degrees F, in practice less than that. This is not cold enough for a refrigerator on a warm day.
- szvsw 1y agoFWIW, in a typical apartment or single-family home, refrigeration uses a fraction of the energy that space cooling (also via a refrigeration/vapor compression cycle) requires on a warm day (and probably year round too unless in very mild climates). The psychrometric chart path is different so there are of course differences in the amount of energy required for the sensible and latent components, but the real difference is just the volume of air that needs to be dealt with. My point being that at least from an energy and carbon perspective, lowering the space cooling demand via more effective building envelopes or increasing the space cooling supply efficiency - eg via membrane or dessicant dehumidification, better heat pumps etc) is far more impactful on a macro scale than better refrigeration. Granted refrigeration in a warehouse eg is really also space cooling, but I’m just making the distinction between the dT=0-25F context and the dT>25F context. If I could only choose one technology to arrive at scale to improve the efficiency, it would be for the former context.
- closewith 1y agoDefinitely not the volume of air. The thermal mass of air is tiny. The difference is in the thermal mass of the building and the surface area exposed to the sun.
- rcxdude 1y agoAlso the area that needs insulating, and in the extremes the amount of air that needs to be exchanged with the outside to make the house livable, and the heat generated by the people living in it (stick a 100W lightbulb in a fridge and see how cold it can get). The insulation is actually solvable, and for heating can basically remove the power requirements: a house heated and using heat exchange on air leaving vs entering can be heated a lot just by having people inside it, let alone the other energy they use for other purposes. It's just more expensive to build this way, and with cheap energy it can a long time to pay back. Cooling you can't push down past the heat generated inside the house divided by the COP of your cooler, though.
- dartharva 1y agoBut why? Cooling has been a solved problem for literally over a century. No Peltier cooler will ever even come close to normal refrigerant-based coolers in efficiency, both in cost and power consumed.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- toast0 1y agoPeltier coolers can do precision better than a compressor. The also work at small sizes/small loads, where a compressor generally needs to be a certain minimum size to be feasible. Do you need those things in a home refrigerator? I suspect not. But it might be handy for lab refrigerators.
- AngryData 1y agoYou can actually get surprisingly small compressors now the last few year. There are a few compressor driven ice coolers available now that are likely worth the effort and price if you need a boost in cooling capacity or battery life over the cheaper peltier equivalents. And they are also used by some people for large bulky cosplay and costume outfits that are otherwise just a super insulated hotbox. Obviously they still have a minimum size limit, but I think many people would be surprised at how small you can get them now.
- ranger_danger 1y agoAre you implying that "normal refrigerant-based coolers" are somehow always the most appropriate solution for any cooling task?
- okanat 1y agoNot the poster but yes. Compressors use phase change which is fundamentally better way of transferring heat. Solids like peltiers will always leak more heat than liquid to gas phase change. Peltiers cannot get the same efficiency because of physics.
- Tistron 1y agoWhat I want is a silent refrigerator, will this bring that? pray
- userbinator 1y agoAbsorption refrigerators have been around for approximately a century, are silent, and a little more efficient than peltiers.
- akvadrako 1y agoI used one for a couple years as my primary fridge. It was expensive, like $2k, didn't have very good temperature control and broke after 2 years and couldn't be repaired.
- marcosdumay 1y agoSo... A little better than Peltier cooling in every other dimension too.
- bob1029 1y agoI've been thinking about what it would look like to convert my GE fridge into a minisplit (i.e., move the compressor, condensing coil & fan outside). You can buy R600a on Amazon right now. One $60 can will charge the system ~5 times.
- toomuchtodo 1y agohttps://patents.google.com/patent/US20120192586A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US20120192586A1/en (abandoned)
- userbinator 1y agoThat would've been easily invalidated by prior art from nearly a century ago; as I mentioned in a sibling comment, this was a common arrangement in the early days of domestic refrigeration. Here's a video from someone who managed to salvage some of the components of such a system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1tXIYl20jA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1tXIYl20jA
- dayjah 1y agoI worked on a scientific instrument a while ago, it had a Peltier heater on it to raise the sample to 60c from whatever residual environment temp was (approx. 20c in a lab). It was pretty amazing to see my old overclocking cooling solution come back around and be used in my professional career some 20+ years later
- madaxe_again 1y agoAnd they couldn’t use a 100% efficient resistive element because…?
- rcxdude 1y agoThe TEC is more than 100% 'efficient' - you get more heat out than power you put in. Though I would guess it's mainly there to get heat control that can span above, around, and slightly below ambient.
- s0rce 1y agotypically only used if you need to stabilize the temp very close to room temperature or cool it below, unusual choice otherwise compared to a heater.
- nullc 1y agoEven above ambient, being able to reverse direction allows limiting any overshoot.
- madaxe_again 1y agoYeah, it occurred to me after asking that that’s likely why - with resistive heating you’re bound to have a fiddly time getting a stable temperature.
- s0rce 1y agoIf you are reasonably above ambient and the control loop is well tuned things work well, unless you are significantly perturbing the system frequently.
- fghorow 1y agoFor those worried about tiny COPs from these gizmos, trawling through the actual paper -- as well as the PR from JHU APL -- in this HN post [1] shows claims of COPs of ~15 for Delta Ts of 1.3°C. A compressor based cooler gets a COP of about 4 in the real world. I'm pretty sure this is an apples to oranges comparison to an expert (I am not one of those) but a factor of 3+ increase in COP is fairly noteworthy -- if it holds up. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44424087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44424087
- moffkalast 1y ago15 is absurd, regular peltiers get like 1.05 at most don't they? That's like inventing the warp drive but for cooling.
- 1oooqooq 1y agolol yeah they did not. it's right on the abstract. > is ~15 for temperature differentials of 1.3 °C.
- rcxdude 1y agoYou can get a COP of ~3-4 out of regular TECs, but only at pretty low temperature differences. That's the killer, fundamentally the TEC material itself is thermally conductive and heat really wants to flow back the other way, so no matter how well it moves the heat, it winds up fighting against the heat load generated by itself. A refrigerant based heat pump works much better because the heat basically only moves in the direction the refrigerant itself is moving.
- scosman 1y agoWhat's a "low temperature difference"? I want to build a wine cooler in my basement ~20-24c, and I want it at ~16c. Is that low enough to be reasonably efficient?
- dmsnell 1y agoTECs are wonderful little devices with operating characteristics unlike comparable devices. They can be designed to move a specific amount of heat or to cool at some delta-T below the hot side (and due to inefficiencies the hot side can climb above ambient temperatures too, raising the “cold side” above ambient!) I ran through a design exercise with a high quality TEC and at 8°C delta-T for a wine cooler you could expect a COP of around 3.5–4 (theoretically). This is pretty good! But below the 2.5V max to do that you’re only able to exhaust up to around 40W. For a wine cooler this is not so bad. For a refrigerator it’s a harder challenge because the temperature drops when the door opens, and if someone sticks in a pot of hot soup, it’s important to eject that heat before it raises the temperature inside to levels where food safety becomes a problem. For a CPU it’s basically untenable under load because it’s too much heat entering the cold side thus temperatures will rise. https://fluffyandflakey.blog/2019/08/29/cooling-a-cpu-with-tecs/ https://fluffyandflakey.blog/2019/08/29/cooling-a-cpu-with-t... Things often overlooked: - Most TECs are cheap and small and come without data sheets, so people tend to become disillusioned after running them too hot. - You have to keep the hot side cool or else the delta-T doesn’t help you. For a wine cooler this is probably no big deal: you can add a sizable fan and heat sink. For CPU cooling it becomes a tighter problem. You basically can’t win by mounting on the CPU; they are best at mediating two independent water-cooling loops. - Q ratings are useless without performance graphs. It’s meaningless to talk about a “100W” TEC other than to estimate that it has a higher capacity than a “20W” TEC. - Ratings and data sheets are hypothetical best cases. Reality constrains the efficiency through a thousand cuts. When I think about TECs I think more about heat transfer than temperature drops. If you open a well-insulated wine cooler once a week then once it cools it will only need to maintain its temperature, and that requires very little heat movement. Since nothing inside is generating heat you basically have zero watts as a first-order approximation. For the same device mentioned above, it stops working below 1V, and at 8° delta-T that’s a drop in COP to around zero but it’s also nearly zero waste. If you were to maintain a constant 2.5V, however, it would continue to try and pull 40W to the hot side. This would cause the internal temperature to drop and your COP would decrease even though the TEC is using constant power. The delta-T would in fact increase until the inefficiencies match the heat transfer and everything stabilizes. In this case that’s around a 20° drop from the hot side, assuming perfect insulation. Unlike compressors, TECs have this convenient ability to scale up and down and maintain consistent temperatures; they just can’t respond quickly and dump a ton of heat in the same way. edit: formatting of list
- iLoveOncall 1y agoThe most impressive thing about this article is that they somehow managed to shoehorn AI in a fridge.
- throwawayoldie 1y agoReminiscent of the Long Island Blockchain Company (makers of Long Island Iced Tea (TM)).
- 1oooqooq 1y agoAI compressor. It's full on clown world.
- TealMyEal 1y agoWhat's even AI about it?
- koakuma-chan 1y agoMuch like a hybrid vehicle, this system intelligently switches between the two cooling methods depending on what best suits the situation.
- throwawayoldie 1y agoSo...it has a microcontroller. Impressive! /s
- SchemaLoad 1y agoHave a look at any product marketing these days. Desktop motherboards are calling the fan curve settings AI cooling. Everything that a computer does now, even if it's done it for 30 years is now AI. It's somehow worse than Blockchain ever was.
- throwawayoldie 1y agoIt may be hard to believe, but software used to be a fun, intellectually satisfying field.
- throwawayoldie 1y agoThe part that's AI about it is the part where it's much easier to get funding if you say it has AI in it.
- BoredPositron 1y agoKilled an AMD K6 with my diy peltier cooler when I was 14 good times.
- dawnerd 1y agoA lot of people consider them gimmicks but the newer gen neck “air conditioners” do actually cool the air and exhaust the hot air so the peltier works. Would love to see it improved for more cooling capacity (and more airflow).
- throwawayoldie 1y ago> Bespoke AI Hybrid Refrigerator Come the fuck on.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hoherd 1y agoSeriously. When I see this kind of absurdity, I think of Humpty Dumpty in Through The Looking Glass: > 'When _I_ use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.' > 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.' > 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master-- that's all.' > Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. 'They've a temper, some of them-- particularly verbs, they're the proudest--adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs--however, _I_ can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what _I_ say!' > 'Would you tell me, please,' said Alice 'what that means?' > 'Now you talk like a reasonable child,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. 'I meant by "impenetrability" that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.' > 'That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
- throwawayoldie 1y agoIf Mr. Dumpty were alive today, he'd be enjoying a brilliant career as a corporate executive.
- teamonkey 1y agoThe Johns Hopkins press release is much better https://www.jhuapl.edu/news/news-releases/250521-apl-thermoelectrics-enable-compressor-free-cooling https://www.jhuapl.edu/news/news-releases/250521-apl-thermoe...
- tootie 1y agoOh nifty. These can also be used to generate electricity from body heat. Or presumably any waste heat.
- dotancohen 1y agoOnly if you have a cold environment into which to dump that heat into. You could maybe trickle charge your phone in the winter, if you don't mind a cold spot where the device sits on your body.
- acyou 1y agoAssuming body is 38 degrees C, and ambient is 20 C, Delta T is 18 C, which "works" to whatever extent.
- coderatlarge 1y agocan this be applied to create devices that maintain a temperature range? ie more than x AND less than y? that’s often needed for medications…
- sebstefan 1y agoDefinitely worse article I don't understand how they could quote him saying: “This thin-film technology has the potential to grow from powering small-scale refrigeration systems to supporting large building HVAC applications, similar to the way lithium-ion batteries have been scaled to power devices as small as mobile phones and as large as electric vehicles,” Then the entire article foregoes comparing their peltier device to traditional compressor based heat pumps.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- acgh213 1y agobeing colorblind, specifically deuteranomaly, it worked, but i do not see the blue green, i see the weird off green i normally do and then basically brown. i would imagine complete red-green would actually impact it
- Havoc 1y agoSounds like they’re using much thinner and thus more efficient bonding on each end of the Peltier device? 75% gains off that seems impressive. Must be something really fancy - thinking of a heat sink just using better therm paste barely moves the needle
- gclawes 1y agoI wonder if this will eventually lead to battery temperature conditioning on cell phones and laptops similar to electric cars.
- mecsred 1y agoNot likely without other contributing technologies. These devices just move heat from one side to the other, at the cost of producing more heat. So you still have to dissipate even more heat on the hot end with a fan/heatsink, in addition to draining the battery running the Peltier.
- mark-r 1y agoI wish they had gone into detail about what makes this device different from Peltier coolers that are available today. You can already get mini fridges that use them, but they're not very good - the total amount of cooling you can get from them is not enough to maintain the temperatures that a regular refrigerator does.
- andai 1y agoCan peltier devices stack?
- eternityforest 1y agoYes but each stack layer has to remove the waste heat from the inefficiency of all the previous layers, so usually you see them laid out in a pyramid
- wood_spirit 1y agoSo this is basically a one-way heat transfer film? Can it be made multi-layer? And can two plys be glued back to back so both are trying to transfer heat from center outwards and act as an insulator?
- yetihehe 1y ago> and act as an insulator? As a heater in this case. > Can it be made multi-layer? Yes, but each layer adds inefficiency and it's own energy.
- renewiltord 1y agoMuch better British tech is the smearing of yogurt on windows https://fortune.com/2025/07/14/yogurt-on-windows-cool-home-ben-roberts-loughborough-university/ https://fortune.com/2025/07/14/yogurt-on-windows-cool-home-b...
- throwawayoldie 1y agoI'm really curious how it occurred to them to try this in the first place. Also I thought Brits spelled it "yoghurt"?
- notpushkin 1y agoSeems to be blocking visitors from Vietnam? https://archive.li/6aT7Y https://archive.li/6aT7Y
- veunes 1y agoThis still feels like early days. The fact that they're sticking with hybrid systems for now suggests we’re not quite at the “compressor-free” future yet. Also, the environmental angle is compelling, eliminating refrigerants would be huge
- ehnto 1y agoI remember back in 2006ish, my PC modding days, buying some peltier modules from eBay and (attempting) to get subzero temps out of my CPU cooling. If I recall correctly I got the setup powered but stopped short of actually putting it on my CPU when I couldn't mount it all in a way that would let me contain the condensation with what I had. Maybe it was pccooling or pccasemods dot com? There was a really strong community forum back then where it was all going down, people were nitrogen cooling their PCs, watercooling was a big deal, and CPU temps of 60c were considered unsustainable. I still overclock my computers but usually my aim is a silent computer under 60% load, so my goals have changed. Peltiers are not something I see taking over PC cooling even now. You still need the same radiator capacity, the peltier just moves the heat away faster and can get below ambient temps at the CPU.
- nick3443 1y agoBit-tech.net was a good one
- ehnto 1y agoOh yeah! That might have been the one actually.
- pvdebbe 1y agoGiven that almost all CPUs these days are thermo-throttled, maybe a controllable Peltier element will be the next Turbo button? I remember that Peltier based cooling setups were electricity hungry.
- mrspuratic 1y agoAnd electrically noisy, at least in my experience. Not a property of the Peltier junction, just crappy PWM control afaict.
- otikik 1y agoMandatory Technology Connections video about Peltier cooling, "Why Thermoelectric Cooling Is Inefficient": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnMRePtHMZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnMRePtHMZY
- zevv 1y agoCould you summarize the contents of this video so we don't have to watch it?
- CivBase 1y agoI haven't watched it recently, but here are the main takeaways I remember: Peltier coolers are neat because they're very small and quiet - as opposed to vapor compression systems solutions. However, they are an order of magnitude less energy efficient. Also Peltier coolers still have to obey the laws of thermodynamics, which means that to cool one side of the mechanism, you must heat the other side. In order to do any substantial cooling, you need a way to dispose of that heat on the other side. This usually involves the use of radiators and fans, which negate much of the size and noise benefits. As a result, Peltier coolers are pretty niché. Your use case would have to require only a little bit of cooling. You'd have to need a form factor that cannot accomidate a vapor cooling solution. And you'd have to be willing to make the system very energy inefficient.
- simonebrunozzi 1y agoAFAIK, no one has tried to build a Peltier cell paired with a heat pump. I am not an expert, but I would imagine that it's a path that could bring higher efficiencies. Thoughts?
- roelschroeven 1y agoIt seems to me that if you have a heat pump, you don't need the Peltier anymore.
- whamlastxmas 1y ago
- Fokamul 1y agoAI hi guys, pretty great AI article about this AI Peltier AI cooling AI tech. Really looking AI forward for another AI Samsung new AI devices. Best regards, AI Ps.: AI
- kayge 1y agoHello! I am a big respectable VC firm. Here is a blank check and a unicorn hat, congratulations on your new AI startup.
- mawadev 1y agoI take three!!
- SideburnsOfDoom 1y agoIt's "if" statements. Maybe a "switch" for when things get advanced. It's that kind of AI.
- poulpy123 1y agoAI comment
- mglinski 1y ago> AI comment AI rebuttal about it not being AI
- tripzilch 1y agoI heard it was trained on stolen refrigerators that were for research purposes only!
- mrbigbob 1y agoHere is an article from Johns Hopkins with a little more information on the newly created material. https://www.jhuapl.edu/news/news-releases/250521-apl-thermoelectrics-enable-compressor-free-cooling https://www.jhuapl.edu/news/news-releases/250521-apl-thermoe...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- khernandezrt 1y agoArticle author really wants those AI hits on search engines!