New material makes cooling devices more energy-efficient
Waste heat from industry can often not be utilised because of its low temperature. With this material, it can be used in environmentally friendly cooling systems for example in the field of building technology. The research team from Kiel will present its material and its applications at the Hannover Messe 2018.
Cooling devices are considered to be power guzzlers, in which polluting refrigerants are still used, even after the ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). An environmentally friendly alternative are systems which use water instead. A research team at the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry at Kiel University, together with the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE in Freiburg, has developed a highly-porous material, with which these cooling systems can be operated using less electrical energy than before. Previously-unused waste heat, e.g. from district heating systems, data centres, or heat from solar thermal collectors could be used for that. The results have been published recently in the journal Advanced Materials.
Data centres in particular are real energy factories: as a side-effect of their operations, high-performance computers produce a lot of heat, and must therefore be cooled continuously. As such, they cause high energy and power costs, while giving off unused waste heat to the environment at the same time – its temperature is too low for other uses. Theoretically, however, this could be used for running energy-efficient cooling systems, which use water as a refrigerant (so called adsorption-driven chillers). To do so, the material used there must be able to absorb a lot of water and regenerate at the lowest possible temperatures.
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