Washington, Jan 11 (ANI): Advanced nanomaterials could now open the door to a new generation of high-performance, cost-effective solid state refrigeration and air conditioning, requiring no refrigerants and no moving parts, a new study led by Indian origin researcher has revealed.
The key ingredients for this innovation by engineering researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are a dash of nanoscale sulfur and a normal, everyday microwave oven.
At the heart of these solid-state cooling systems are thermoelectric materials, which can convert electricity into a range of different temperatures-from hot to cold.
Thermoelectric refrigerators employing these principles have been available for more than 20 years, but they are still small and highly inefficient.
This is largely because the materials used in current thermoelectric cooling devices are expensive and difficult to make in large quantities, and do not have the necessary combination of thermal and electrical properties.
Driving this research breakthrough is the idea of intentionally contaminating, or doping, nanostructured thermoelectric materials with barely-there amounts of sulfur.
The doped materials are obtained by cooking the material and the dopant together for few minutes in a store-bought 40 dollars microwave oven. The resulting powder is formed into pea-sized pellets by applying heat and pressure in a way that preserves the properties endowed by the nanostructuring and the doping.
These pellets exhibit properties better than the hard-to-make thermoelectric materials currently available in the marketplace.
Additionally, this new method for creating the doped pellets is much faster, easier, and cheaper than conventional methods of making thermoelectric materials.
"This is not a one-off discovery. Rather, we have developed and demonstrated a new way to create a whole new class of doped thermoelectric materials with superior properties," said Ganpati Ramanath, who led the study.
"Our findings truly hold the potential to transform the technology landscape of refrigeration and make a real impact on our lives," he added.
The study has been recently published in the journal Nature Materials. (ANI)
|
|
Comments:
