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Sustainable Cooling: Electrocaloric Cooling Breakthrough

Posted on January 30, 2024January 30, 2024 by dishanth

As heatwaves intensify across the globe, the demand for air conditioning and refrigeration skyrockets. The ballooning demand for cooling strains energy infrastructure and escalates emissions from vapor compression systems. These conventional refrigerators and AC units rely on greenhouse gases and inefficient mechanical compressors that have reached their efficiency limits. With little room for improvement, vapor compression technology cannot sustainably shoulder doubling cooling demands. Scientists urgently search for climate-friendly innovations before the warming world overheats.

In a breakthrough discovery, researchers at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) pioneer a radically different cooling approach harnessing the electrocaloric cooling effect. This phenomenon describes particular ceramic materials that heat up or cool down when electric fields flip on and off. By cleverly leveraging this conductivity toggle, the LIST team designed an assembly that can pump heat without noisy, energy-draining compressors.

Electrocaloric cooling is a fascinating phenomenon where certain materials experience a reversible temperature change when an electric field is applied. In simpler terms, you can directly use electricity to manipulate their temperature, creating a cooling effect. This opens up exciting possibilities for energy-efficient and environmentally friendly cooling technologies.

The regenerative system developed by LIST alternates layers of electrocaloric capacitors with liquid coolant. Switching an electric field pulls heat from the fluid into the capacitors, cooling the system. Cutting voltage then dissipates the heat, so the cycle repeats. The smooth back-and-forth between hot and cold replaces high-maintenance mechanical parts with solid-state reliability. Scientists calculate that electrocaloric cooling efficiency leapfrogs vapor compression refrigeration by directly shuffling heat instead of wasting effort compressing refrigerants.

Since fluids naturally stratify by temperature, no added energy input is required to cycle hot and cold. The passive electrocaloric cooling generator minimizes electricity demands by exploiting thermodynamics rather than fighting against them. With game-changing energy savings over traditional refrigerator designs, this electrocaloric cooling technology paves the way for truly sustainable cooling.

Seeking real-world integration, LIST researchers collaborate with manufacturing partners to develop prototypes. The original discovery featured a single electrocaloric part, which limited heat transfer speed. The current regenerator assembly overcame this by interleaving many capacitors with parallel coolant channels. This boosts heat pumping capacity for powerful, real-world performance. Ongoing enhancements also aim to lower costs and extend operating lifetimes to enable widespread commercialization.

While the immediate goal focuses on eco-friendly refrigeration, the applications likely won’t stop there. Any process generating unwanted heat could benefit from electrocaloric cooling technology. Air conditioners, electronics cooling, industrial processes and even solar energy storage represent prospective opportunities. Because electrocaloric cooling systems thrive when miniaturized, microchip-level cooling also offers possibilities for computing breakthroughs.

For example, electrocaloric cooling films could provide on-chip cooling for high-performance computer processors, enabling faster computing speeds. Electrocaloric cooling systems can also be used to condense water vapor in air conditioning and dehumidification applications. This could allow environmentally-friendly refrigerants like water instead of HFCs to be used in vapor compression HVAC.

Additionally, the flexibility of electric-powered cooling lends well to renewable energy integration and smart grid load balancing. Electrocaloric heat pumps powered by wind or solar electricity during times of excess generation could store thermal energy for later dispatch while synchronizing supply and demand on the grid. With materials and system configuration innovations, electrocaloric cooling technologies show promise for revolutionizing thermal management across many sectors.

Despite enormous promise, unanswered questions remain regarding large-scale manufacturing and durability. However, early indications suggest the regenerator’s simple solid-state design will prove reliable over long stretches. By dodging complex mechanical components, the approach naturally steers towards sustainability. Cooling demand will only climb higher as climate change continues, but creative solutions like the LIST electrocaloric cooling regenerator offer hope we can innovate our way to a cooler future.

Source Happy Eco News

The Five Best Ways for Free Home Cooling with No AC

Posted on July 25, 2023 by dishanth

It’s hot these days. Here are the five common sense ways for home cooling with no AC.

Close your curtains and blinds during the day. This will help to keep the sun’s heat out of your home. If you don’t have curtains or blinds, you can use sheets or towels to cover your windows. Close your curtains and blinds during the day.
Run ceiling fans. Ceiling fans can help to circulate the air in your home, which can help to keep you cool. If you have a ceiling fan, ensure it is set to blow down.
Use fans to create a cross breeze. If you have windows on opposite sides of your home, you can open them to create a cross breeze. This will help to draw the cooler air in from outside and push the hot air out.
Take cool showers or baths. Taking a cool shower or bath can help to lower your body temperature. You can also use a wet towel to cool down your neck and forehead.
Cook outside and unplug devices. Cooking outside on a barbeque, camp stove, RV, or other appliance outside will help keep your house cooler. The heat generated by an oven or a stove can quickly counteract any other efforts you made throughout the day.

Here are some additional tips to keep your home cool without air conditioning:

Ventilate your home at night. If it’s cooler outside than it is inside, open your windows at night to let in the cool air and begin the next day with a nice cool house.
Plant trees around your home. Trees can help to shade your home and keep it cooler in the summer.
Use reflective insulation. Reflective insulation can help to reflect the sun’s heat away from your home.
Seal up any air leaks. Air leaks can let in hot air, so sealing them up is important.

By following these tips, you can keep your home cool without air conditioning and save money on your energy bills.

Source Happy Eco News

Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage for Renewables

Posted on May 26, 2023 by dishanth

It’s Not All About Energy Generation

When the topic of decarbonization comes up, oftentimes, we think of transportation or energy generation. These issues are important, as vehicle emissions are a major problem, as well as emissions from fossil fuel power generation. However, while important, these issues only partially show the roadblocks to moving towards a green future.

Another component that needs to be addressed in the conversation is energy storage and efficiency in renewable energy.

Wind and solar energy are important and rapidly developing technologies but are dependent on weather conditions that vary from month to month and from year to year. In colder months, when houses need to heat, that is when significantly less sunlight is present, thus driving down the available energy to heat them.

This is why energy storage is crucial to the conversation regarding renewable energy, but other solutions might mitigate this problem if properly implemented. This is how aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) could help assist in cooling and heating buildings, reducing the reliance on other renewable energy sources.

How About Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage?

Energy storage is a difficult topic to address, as the technologies required to implement large-scale grid energy storage require, ironically, a lot of energy. This isn’t helped by the fact that hydrogen energy storage systems right now lose a significant amount of the energy stored.

This is why reducing the grid energy demand is important to implement renewable energy systems successfully. Aquifer thermal energy storage is an interesting form of renewable energy specific to the heating and cooling of buildings because it ties in directly with the seasons that affect solar energy so much.

It works by utilizing two wells connected to the same groundwater reservoir. Cold groundwater is pumped up to cool the building during the summer, then stored. The same process happens in winter but in reverse. Warm groundwater is pumped up into the building, then stored.

Aquifer thermal energy storage systems can also store excess heat from industrial operations, similar to the geothermal systems being deployed in decommissioned oil wells. This process can help bridge the gap between the seasonal availability of renewable energy while at the same time decarbonizing the heating and cooling sector.

This system is also useful because it can make energy infrastructure more resilient by reducing the demand currently placed upon it by heating and cooling. According to a study in Science Direct, Aquifer thermal energy storage systems could reduce reliance on fossil fuels for energy by up to 40%.

New Tech can Help but not Solve Inherent Limits

The importance of renewable energy in the transition to a greener world cannot be understated. However, it is also important to recognize that there are limitations to the technology currently available.

Going forward, there are certainly ways that renewable energy, specifically solar, can become more efficient; the issue of seasonal availability will always be there. This is why alternative methods of addressing needs like heating and cooling are as important.

The issue of energy storage is also important because bridging the gap between availability and need is necessary for making renewable energy a viable alternative to our current fossil fuel energy generation system.

Source Happy Eco News

Could this colourful plant-based film replace the need for air conditioning?

Posted on April 4, 2023April 4, 2023 by dishanth

Scientists at Cambridge University in the UK are working on an eco-friendly alternative. Their invention consists of a plant-based film that stays cool when exposed to sunlight.

The material could someday be used to keep buildings and cars cool without the need for external power. Coming in a range of textures and bright iridescent colours, it’s aesthetically pleasing too.

How does the eco-friendly cooling film work?

For a material to stay cooler than the air around it during the daytime, there are two critical requirements. It must have high solar reflectance to reflect the warmth of the sun and not heat the air around it. It must also have a high emissivity in infrared bands to emit heat into outer space efficiently.

Only a few materials have these properties and scientists are already developing them into paints and films capable of what is known as ‘passive daytime radiative cooling’ (PDRC).

When applied to the surface of a car or building, it means that these materials create a cooling effect without consuming electricity or creating pollution.

How can PDRC materials be made more attractive?

Since they need to be solar reflective, PDRC materials are usually white or silver.

Adding colour would decrease their cooling performance. This is because coloured pigments selectively absorb specific wavelengths of light, only reflecting the colours we see. This extra light absorption creates a warming effect.

“These limited colours hinder the applications where visual appearance is a key consideration, such as for architecture, cars and clothes,” says project member, Dr Qingchen Shen.

To increase the desirability of these materials, colour is an important factor.

Along with the project’s lead investigator, Dr Silvia Vignolini, Dr Shen set out to research ways of achieving colour without the use of pigments.

They looked to structural colouration as a solution. This is where shapes and patterns reflect specific colours of light without the presence of pigmentation, as seen on soap bubbles and oil slicks.

Seeking a natural source of this phenomenon, the research team used cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) – derived from the cellulose found in plants – to create iridescent, colourful films without any added pigment.

“We specifically use cellulose-based materials for our films because cellulose is the most abundant polymer in nature,” says Dr Shen.

It is also one of the few natural materials capable of promoting PDRC.

After experimenting with basic colours, the researchers are now working on glittery CNC-ethyl cellulose films. They are also developing different textures that could blend in with various wood finishes.

How effective is the colourful cooling film?

The researchers created layered cellulose films in vibrant blue, green and red colours and put them to the test.

When placed under sunlight, they were an average of nearly 4°C cooler than the surrounding air.

One square metre of the film generated over 120 watts of cooling power, rivalling many types of residential air conditioners.

As a general guideline, bedrooms require around 80 watts per square metre and living spaces 125 watts of air conditioning capacity.

The researchers hope to find new ways to leverage CNC-ethyl cellulose films. These include adding sensors to detect environmental pollutants or weather changes.

Ultimately, they hope the film coating could serve several purposes at once. It could be used to both cool buildings and to alert to changing levels of pollutants in congested areas, for example.

Source Euronews Green

Air Conditioning in a Camping Tent – Just Add Water

Posted on March 22, 2023March 22, 2023 by dishanth

The fabrics currently used to make tents are engineered to block out winds and water to help keep their inhabitants dry and comfortable, but they tend to work both ways, preventing hot air from escaping from the tent. The tent can feel sweltering, even with plenty of ventilation.

You can always pack a portable air conditioner to drop the temperature inside your tent, but those require an ingredient that is often in short supply at rural campsites: electricity. Running a portable AC unit or even a simple fan on a solar panel for an extended period is impossible, and you do not want to carry batteries in your backpack.

Al Kasani, a researcher at the University of Connecticut’s Center For Clean Energy Engineering, drew inspiration from the way plants wick water from the ground and then sweat to cool themselves. Subsequently, he designed a self-cooling tent fabric that retains its thin and lightweight nature; with an added twist – it is fortified with titanium nanoparticles that absorb moisture from reservoirs at the base of the tent. This releases water across its surface, rapidly evaporating, resulting in a cooling effect that reduces internal temperature by up to 20 degrees.

Using either water sourced from a faucet at a campsite or water drawn from a stream in a rural setting, Kasani estimates that a gallon of water can keep a tent cool for up to 24 hours. You don’t need purified, clean water, evaporative cooling works with any water.

This upgraded fabric won’t be available in camping gear for a while—the material is still in the research phase—but according to the university, “industry interest has been high in Kasani’s technology.”

It will be interesting to see this type of product enter the mainstream. Any success with a passive cooling system like this will have spinoffs that can help in other ways. Suppose you can cool a camping tent by 20 degrees. In that case, you could also provide cooling shelters to protect vulnerable people living on the streets without access to air conditioning. A similar protection could be created for refugees or hospitals in hotter regions. Advances in technology might even find a way to use it to cool traditional buildings and reduce energy costs in warehouses. The potential is almost endless.

Source Happy Eco News

Big data, low carbon: how data centres innovate for sustainability

Posted on July 7, 2022 by dishanth

Data centres are well-known for being energy guzzlers because of the growth of digital demand. Worldwide, they consume an estimated 200 terawatt hours a year (TWh/yr), or nearly 1 per cent of global electricity demand.

That said, the energy consumption of data centres has not grown at the exponential rate of Internet traffic. This is due to the huge strides made in energy efficiency in data centres. Improvements in the efficiency of servers, storage devices and data centre infrastructure, as well as the move away from small data centres to larger cloud and hyperscale data centres, have all helped to limit the growth of electricity demand.

According to figures from a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), from 2010 to 2020, the number of internet users worldwide has doubled and global internet traffic has expanded 15-fold. But global data centre energy use has been flat since 2015, at about 200 TWh/yr.

Globally, leading data centre operators have committed to carbon neutrality and science-based targets for emissions reduction by 2030. To achieve these goals, they have partnered with technology companies to develop ways of reducing energy consumption at all levels of operation – from direct-to-chip cooling to providing on-site prime power through alternative energy fuel cells.

New cooling solutions

One of the main areas of innovation is developing new solutions to cool data centres more efficiently as their capacity grows. Typically, cooling accounts for a large proportion of overall power consumption. Estimates from 2021 suggest that the figure ranges from 30 to 37 per cent.

Air cooling has been widely adopted in data centres since their inception. The basic principle of such systems involves circulating cold air around the hardware to dissipate heat.

More high power-density racks of up to 50kW are being deployed in data centres, such as those at Equinix’s International Business Exchange (IBX) data centres around the world. Source: Equinix.

But air cooling systems are struggling to keep up with the increases in the power density of racks. Thanks to new generations of central processing units (CPUs), rack power requirements have moved from below 20 kilowatts (kW) to up to 40 or 50 kW today, easily.

Air cooling systems have evolved to address higher densities, but there is a point at which air just does not have the thermal transfer properties to do so in an efficient manner. This has caused organisations to look into liquid cooling, as water and other fluids are up to 3,000 times more efficient in transferring heat than air.

Liquid cooling is available in a variety of configurations that use different technologies, including rear door heat exchangers and direct-to-chip cooling.

Rear door heat exchangers is the more mature technology, where a liquid-filled coil is mounted in place of the rear door of the rack. As server fans move heated air through the rack, the coil absorbs the heat before the air enters the data centre.

Direct-to-chip cooling integrates the cooling system directly into the computer’s chassis. A liquid coolant is brought via tubes directly to the chip, where it absorbs heat and removes it from the data hall. The warm liquid is then circulated to a cooling device or heat exchange.

One of the world’s largest data centre providers, Equinix, for example, is developing a new direct-to-chip cooling technology at their Co-Innovation Facility (CIF) located in the Washington DC area. Developed in collaboration with Zutacore, the system introduces a cooling fluid to an evaporator overlying the CPU to absorb heat directly, which in turn causes the liquid to evaporate and produce a constant temperature over the CPU.

Hotter temperatures

Some operators are challenging the thinking that data centres should be operated at low temperatures of 20 to 22 degrees celsius. There is evidence to support the running of data centres ‘hot’, i.e., increasing their temperature by 1 or 2 degrees Celsius, which improves efficiency without any significant sacrifices in system reliability.

In Singapore, the Infocomm Media Development Authority has been trialing the world’s first ‘tropical data centre’, to test if data centres can function optimally at temperatures of up to 38 degrees Celsius and ambient humidity up to or exceeding 90 per cent.

Running with simulated data, the trial would test how data servers react under various situations, such as peak surges or while transferring data, and in conditions such as with no temperature or humidity controls.

Using digital resources and analytics to optimise energy usage

Smart solutions monitoring energy consumption patterns allow data centres to configure the optimal use of their resources, as well as to identify and diagnose equipment problems and take steps to fix them. Software powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can also assist companies to better manage their infrastructure and maximise the utilisation of their CPUs.

In an interview with Fortune, Equinix’s chief executive Charles Meyer explained that AI is used in the company’s data centres to “anticipate where power needs to be applied, how cooling… needs to be done to improve the power usage efficiency of the facility overall”.

Using on-site lower-carbon energy sources

New cooling solutions and digital resources are offsetting the energy consumption from increasing data centre services. However, there remains the question of energy supply to the facility overall.

A totally carbon-free solution would involve locating a data centre beside a wind- or solar-generated renewable energy source, or purchasing 100 per cent green energy from the grid. But these may not always be feasible solutions. In Singapore, for instance, space constraints limit the use of solar energy, and wind conditions are not sufficient for wind power.

Alternatives include the use of fuel cells for primary power supply at data centres. Fuel cells generate power through electrochemical reactions using natural gas, biogas or LPG. Testing by Equinix at CIF indicates they are 20 to 40 per cent cleaner than gas-powered electricity generation.

Fuel cells generate power through electrochemical reactions using natural gas, biogas or LPG. Source: Equinix.

When fuel cells are set up near data centres, there are even greater efficiencies. The generated electricity has less distance to travel and hence less energy is lost in the transmission process.

Equinix has deployed fuel cells at 15 of its facilities, including the carrier-neutral SV11 opened in San Jose in 2021, which utilises 4 megawatts (MW) of fuel cells for primary power production on site and can scale up to 20 MW of fuel cells.

Equinix is also part of a consortium of seven companies (including InfraPrime, RISE, Snam, SOLIDpower, TEC4FUELS and Vertiv) which launched the Eco Edge Prime Power (E2P2) project. E2P2 is exploring the integration of fuel cells with uninterruptible power supply technology and lithium-ion batteries to provide resilient and low-carbon primary power to data centres.

This work will also pave the way to transition from natural gas to green hydrogen (hydrogen produced using renewable energy) in fuel cells. Such advances are a step change towards sustainability where green hydrogen is available.

A holistic approach

Energy efficiency is crucial in determining future emissions in an industry that will continue growing in response to digitalisation and data consumption.

Besides energy efficiency, major data centre operators are interested in holistic sustainability gains that minimise carbon emissions. They consider how sustainable their supply chains are, total resource use and the company’s whole carbon footprint such as the embodied carbon in building materials.

Equinix, for example, has adopted a global climate-neutral goal by 2030 and has embedded decarbonisation actions across its business and supply chain.

Jason Plamondon, Equinix’s regional manager for sustainability in Asia-Pacific, says that the company is “well on (its) way to meeting (its) climate commitments, with over 95 per cent renewable coverage for (its) portfolio in FY21, maintaining over 90 per cent for the fourth consecutive year”.

He adds: “As the world’s digital infrastructure company, we have the responsibility to harness the power of technology to create a more accessible, equitable and sustainable future. Our Future First sustainability approach includes continuing to innovate and develop new technologies that contribute to protecting our planet.”

Source Eco Business