Raphael Thys
Burning fossil fuels creates greenhouse gas emissions that heat up our planet, and researchers are fighting heat with heat as if the antidote were in the poison.
As the industry is the third largest responsible party and dependent on heat to perform various processes, researchers from ETH Zurich and Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences innovated heat pumps to help this sector become eco-friendly.
As ETH Zurich reported, most heat pumps rely on fossil fuels for energy. The refrigerant, especially that changes the liquid into a gas in the apparatus, can be terrible for the environment.
Researchers set out to make a heat pump that would meet industry and sound environmental standards.
What is a heat pump, and how does it work?
A heat pump functions similarly to a refrigerator or air conditioner pump. It extracts heat from the air, water, or waste heat from a factory, as the International Energy Association explains. A compressor then moves a refrigerant through a refrigeration cycle, and a heat exchanger extracts the heat.
However, the industry needs significantly high temperatures, which made their usage a focus of interest for researchers in Zurich as “Switzerland is responsible for about 8 percent of total GHG emissions.”
Residential heat pumps have experienced “a large uptake in recent years,” as stated in the study published in Science Direct. However, their application in the industry remains untapped because the systems already in place are complicated.
Researchers succeeded in creating a heat pump, however, able to generate up to 200 degrees Celsius while remaining safe for the environment. Furthermore, ETH Zurich reports that this novel heat pump meets industry needs more than the options already available.
So how did they do it? The refrigerant.
Up to 25% improvement in functionality
Whereas most systems use one type of refrigerant, researchers from ETH Zurich concocted a blend that can be modified. It allows heat to be drawn from different sources to generate different temperature profiles, as the industry requires that kind of flexibility. By focusing on the blend, users can change the composition to achieve their temperature needs.
Interestingly enough, it’s the refrigerant’s chemical composition that dictates the temperature using a computer model that tailors these two ingredients.
“The researchers’ model draws on over 200 million known synthetic molecules to simulate a blend of two molecules that offers the most efficient heat-pump performance,” ETH Zurich says.
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In comparison to the current industrial pump, the eco-friendly heat pump demonstrates a 25% improvement in functionality and waste reduction.
Researchers from ETH Zurich hope that industries will integrate their new and improved heat pumps as the fight to reduce carbon emissions continues.
By innovating the systems already in place, scientists seem to be coming up with novel solutions every day to address climate change, which is driving innovation across the board.
It’s also cost-effective, which hopefully will encourage the players to continue supporting efforts to fuel the industry with eco-friendly power sources.
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Maria Mocerino Originally from LA, Maria Mocerino has been published in Business Insider, The Irish Examiner, The Rogue Mag, Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines, and now Interesting Engineering.