Barocal can cool your food and drink by squeezing a hunk of plastic crystals

Source: TechCrunch

Barocal can cool your food and drink by squeezing a hunk of plastic crystals

Refrigerators today run on the same basic technology as they did more than 100 years ago. You’d think we could have come up with something better by now.

And we have, but nothing has been able to dethrone cheap, reliable vapor‑compression—the process that’s keeping your milk cold today. One startup hopes to change that.

Barocal has developed an entirely new way of heating and cooling using nothing but an inexpensive solid material. Early prototypes are already as effective as existing refrigerator compressors, and the technology promises to use significantly less energy. There’s also no risk of leaking climate‑warming gases, a problem that has plagued vapor‑compression systems.

Funding

To prepare the technology for market, Barocal has raised a $10 million seed round, the startup exclusively told TechCrunch. Investors in the round included World Fund, Breakthrough Energy Discovery, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, and IP Group.

Origin of the Technology

Barocal’s core technology stems from research performed by Xavier Moya, the startup’s founder.

“I’ve always been very interested in technologies for heating and cooling,” Moya told TechCrunch. He traces his fascination back to his youth in Spain, where he would spend hours studying in a small, hot room. “I really remember when air conditioning came to the house—it was like wow!”

As a professor of materials physics at the University of Cambridge, Moya focused on refrigerants of all kinds, eventually becoming fascinated by solid materials that could capture and release heat simply by being squeezed and stretched. In one of his favorite demonstrations, he asks people to take a deflated balloon, hold it to their lips, and repeatedly stretch and relax it:

“If you stretch it, it gets hot. And then if you wait, when you let it go, it feels cold.”

How It Works

The principle applies to a class of organic materials Barocal has developed, related to compounds widely used in plastics, paints, and other industries. In their normal state, the molecules inside the material rotate freely. When compressed, the molecules stop rotating. Since heat, at its most basic level, is the movement of atoms and molecules, reducing that movement causes the material to release heat. Releasing the pressure allows the material to absorb heat.

Barocal uses these materials to transfer heat. In a refrigerator, for example, the material pumps heat from inside the fridge to the outside, lowering the temperature of the food within. To move heat, the company circulates water past the solid material and then routes the warmed water to a radiator.

Because the refrigerant is a solid, gas leaks are not a concern. Conventional refrigerators rely on gaseous refrigerants that can either degrade the ozone layer or warm the climate. Greenhouse‑gas‑based refrigerants have become a particular concern since they can warm the climate over 1,000 times more than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide (source).

Market Focus

Although Barocal’s technology can work at any scale, the company is initially targeting large HVAC systems and commercial refrigerators—applications where efficiency gains can make a noticeable dent in a customer’s bottom line.

“We are looking at bigger commercial systems where I think we can make a bigger impact faster,” Moya said.

References

• Barocal website: https://barocal.com/
• Why we still use super greenhouse gases in home air conditioners (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/14/why-are-we-still-using-super-greenhouse-gases-in-our-home-air-conditioners/
• High‑GWP refrigerants (California Air Resources Board): https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/resources/documents/high-gwp-refrigerants