Barocal can cool your food and drinks by squeezing plastic crystals

Refrigerators today use the same technology as they did more than 100 years ago. You would think we would have come up with something better by now.

And we have, but nothing has been able to slow down the reliable air flow – the process that is keeping your milk cold today. Another startup hopes to change that.

Baroque they have developed a new method of heating and cooling using nothing but a cheap solid material. The first prototypes are already as effective as existing refrigeration compressors, and the technology promises to use much less energy. Oh, and there is no risk of greenhouse gas emissions, something that has undermined the vapor pressure.

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

Barocal’s core technology comes from the research done by Xavier Moya, the founder. “I’ve always been very interested in heating and cooling technologies,” he told TechCrunch. He takes it from his childhood in Spain, where he spent hours studying in a small, hot room. “I remember vividly when the cold air came home – it was like wow!” he remembered.

As a professor of the physics of materials at the University of Cambridge, he focused on refrigerants of all kinds, although he was very attracted to hard objects that can hold and release heat simply by squeezing and stretching them. In one of his favorite shows, he asks people to take a deflated balloon, hold it to their lips, and repeatedly stretch and relax it.

“If you stretch it, you get hot, and if you wait, if you let it go, you get cold,” he said.

The same principle applies to the range of tools developed by Barocal, which are compatible with natural materials that are widely used in various industries, from plastics to paints. In most cases, the molecules inside the material rotate freely. But under pressure, 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. Removing the pressure allows the materials to heat up.

Barocal uses these materials to transfer heat. In a refrigerator, for example, the elements pump heat from the inside of the refrigerator to the outside, lowering the temperature of the food inside. In order to transfer heat, the company runs water through the equipment and to the radiator.

Because the material is solid, gas leaks are not a problem. In conventional refrigeratorsAir conditioners either destroy ozone or cause climate change, depending on the type. Greenhouse gas-powered refrigerators have become a major concern because they can heat up the climate multiplied by 1,000 than the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.

Although Barocal’s technology can work on any scale, the company is studying large HVAC and refrigeration systems first, machines where the benefits of the introduction make the customer look better. “We’re looking at the big business practices where I think we can do things quickly,” Moya said.