Seeing title:
revolutionary
Rule: when someone claims a revolutionary product, it’s probably bullshit as I see revolutionary product announcements about twice a day and real revolutions about once every decade at best.
Reading article:
Yeap, this is something somewhere in some lab that one day maybe a decade from now find its way into a consumer product, but probably not air conditioners anyway…
For the moment it sort of sounds sort of like a Peltier cooler, which also is useless for airconditioning
I searched for “nitinol cooling system” and found articles dating back to 2016 about the same technology at a German university –
https://newatlas.com/shape-memory-refrigerant-free/41652
https://newatlas.com/shape-memory-alloy-nitinol-heating-cooling/58837/
Cool tech, but this recent article lacks substance compared to the older ones. Also interesting that the German team claimed 2x better efficiency than a typical heat pump.
You know what’s even cheaper to run than this “new technology”? Breathy promotion pieces that give no evidence whatsoever to support it’s claims. Way to go, PR folks.
Good for Slovenia.
Is this cheaper to run more expensive to buy type of deal? If so I want one of those
It says the current tech is only 15% efficient vs current AC which is 20-30%, so no it would be more expensive to run. Since it doesn’t exist as a product yet, we can’t really compare initial installation costs, and probably not maintenance costs either. Hopefully they can improve on the efficiency, but there may be a theoretical maximum efficiency and I have no idea if that’s higher than 30% or not
Yeah, you could probably achieve 15% cooling efficiency with regular old nitrogen or methane instead of fluorocarbons.
Extremely interesting. Some technical challenges remain, but so many applications if solved.
