Having caused global warming we use more air conditioning to keep cool, whilst aircon raises city temperatures by up to a further 3°C, so what can we do?

LONDON, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM , July 31, 2023/EINPresswire.com/ -- Having caused global warming, we use more air conditioning to keep cool. People are moving to cities and that aircon – too expensive for many - raises city temperatures by up to a further 3°C . The refrigerants used in air conditioning, refrigerators and freezers are being replaced with ones that do not damage the ozone layer or cause global warming but some of the new refrigerants have toxic precursors and by-products on wrongful disposal. Time for a Tesla of cooling.

When Tesla first appeared, the incumbents derided the cost of electric vehicles, missing the point that costs would tumble and new laws would make competitors give Tesla billions. The full cooling analysis is in new Zhar Research reports, “Passive Cooling Materials and Devices: New Markets 2023-2043” and “Active Cooling: Large New Materials, Systems Markets 2023-2043”.

Dr Peter Harrop, CEO of Zhar Research says, “The certainty is global warming will not be reversed for a very long time. People seek more cooling as part of raising living standards and in places like India, where 50°C excursions are becoming more common, it can be a matter of life and death. Despite the financial and human costs, the incumbents are not working enthusiastically on the many alternatives that are potentially cheaper and cause less or no heating. The situation is wide open for a Tesla in the cooling industry.”

So what are these alternatives? Zhar Research paints this picture. None have refrigerants. Most are passive – needing no power at all and causing no heating. However, many are active and these are mostly solid state and a few use benign liquids not under pressure. There will be no one-size-fits-all. For example, thermoelectric cooling is solid state and good for cooling the imminent 1kW microprocessors but it is proving tough to rid thermoelectrics of materials with toxic by-products and make it scale economically.

Scale up a bit on that to include the hotter smartphones and other devices arriving and medical dressings that cool. Here emerging passive cooling options include heat sinks, heat pipes, vapor chambers, metamaterials and hydrogel. Largest still and we get to the big money on vehicles, buildings and infrastructure. Here we must consider Passive Daytime Radiative Cooling PDRC, Insulated Cooling with Evaporation, Radiation ICER, Janus JET, Anti-Stokes and various conductive, convective and phase change options – all passive. Add to that active cooling reinvented as electrocaloric, barocaloric, mechanocaloric, electrochemical, phase change, direct liquid cooling, optofluidic, radiative electrochromism, switchable and multimode optofluidics, switchable phase-change reflection and active window cooling to name just a few.

Zhar Research identifies the best candidates for new multi-billion-dollar businesses and the leading developers, many of them startups. However, it is too early to pick a technology with the most revenue and a developer with the best prospects.

Dr Harrop adds, “Clearly buildings will remain the largest value market for cooling and combined solutions including heat insulation and ancient breeze-trapping and convective designs have a place. Sometimes cooling the person rather than the surrounding makes sense and many new technologies are arriving for just that. Active cooling is often stronger and very low-cost electricity from solar power on windows, driveways, vehicles and more will make active cooling economically viable as long as it does not cook our cities. Nevertheless, it is unacceptable to have conventional aircon tripling by 2050, 4.5 billion air conditioning units worldwide consuming 13% percent of all electricity if not improved. Cooling of buildings currently accounts for roughly 10% of global energy consumption and it is the fastest-growing end use of energy in the building sector. In particular, solving the retrofit problem is more important than fitting reinvented cooling technology on the much smaller number of new buildings.”

What’ll be the impact on suppliers of traditional vapor compression cooling materials when a Tesla arrives? In the old car industry, those supplying lubricants, anti-freeze and diesel engines have had modest success in pivoting to supply electric vehicle needs such as electric motors such as Cummins. Nonetheless, Tesla prefers to see most parts as key enabling technology best kept in-house, including cooling its motors, batteries and control electronics. Lessons for those supplying refrigerants, pumps and piping systems for cooling buildings and white goods?”

Harrop surmises that, “The Tesla of cooling may be an expert in what is variously called structural electronics, multipurpose smart materials and multifunctional composites. Not necessarily a startup for that is the world of DuPont, 3M, Asahi Kasei and other giants nowadays. Indeed, an outer layer of a building or window may be self-cleaning, self-healing and have other attributes beyond cooling. See Zhar Research report, “Self-Healing Engineering Markets, Technology 2024-2044”.

To bring these megatrends alive, let us consider two of the many breakthroughs in 2023. Solar panels are increasingly put on lakes because that cooling sharply increases their output. No water available? Well, India’s TriNANO Technologies has just announced a nanocoating for solar modules that lowers the panel temperature by 2-3°C compared to non-coated panels. It also increases power generation by up to 4% owing to its light trapping, anti-reflection and self-cleaning properties. A 10MW solar power plant with nanocoated panels would generate additional yearly power of 720MWh – in India garnering an extra $20,737 per year. These results have been verified by three independent institutes worldwide and the dry process can be applied to existing panels.
PDRC materials need to combine a high solar reflectance to reduce solar energy gain and a high infrared emittance to increase radiative heat loss. If they are used as fabrics, the materials need additional properties such as flexibility and breathability. Tough one, but this year Harbin Institute of Technology, China, announced such a magical fabric based on cotton polyester fiber dipped in precursor solution made by grinding barium sulfate, titania or silica with polyvinylidene difluoride (PVDF) and N-methyl pyrrolidone (NMP) microparticles. This metafabric reached temperature drops of up to 12.6 °C. That means passively-cooling hats, apparel, tents and car covers are in the frame.

Dr Peter Harrop
Zhar Research
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