science
How come that super-smart AI of yours didn't figure this out, frontier labs?
Datacenter cooling could get a lot more affordable, and sustainable, if a joint German-Japanese research project can be scaled beyond the laboratory. Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the University of Tsukuba published a paper in Nature Energy on Friday discussing the success they had with a solid-state cooling technology that doesn’t need any electric input at all, and was still able to demonstrate temperature reductions in laboratory experiments. For those unfamiliar with solid-state cooling, it’s a more sustainable alternative to traditional compression cooling that relies on environmentally harmful refrigerants and lots of electricity. Instead of compressing and expanding a gas to generate cold, some solid-state systems rely on thermoelectric materials that, when supplied with electricity, can generate temperature differences. Thermoelectric solid-state cooling systems can be incredibly small, but there’s a catch: They still need energy, and they’re only a quarter as efficient as modern compression cooling systems, as the researchers noted.
Enter elastocaloric cooling, which relies on shape-memory alloys that change temperature when mechanically loaded and unloaded through a phase transition. It’s that sort of material and methodology that the KIT and Tsukuba team experimented with.
