For more than a century, vapour-compression technologies have dominated refrigeration applications. However, these systems often use hydrofluorocarbons for refrigerants, which are environmentally harmful and have a significant climate impact. Thus, developing high-efficiency cooling technologies that use environmentally safe, low-climate impact alternatives has become an important goal. Caloric effect-based cooling, like magneto- or electrocaloric refrigeration, which uses solid materials that heat or cool when subjected to a changing magnetic or electric field, is a promising technology. However, they remain somewhat limited by their energy efficacy and cooling potential. Researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a new approach to cooling- ionocaloric refrigeration. Ionocaloric cooling takes advantage of how energy or heat is stored or released when a material changes phase, such as from solid ice to liquid water. The ionocaloric cycle causes this phase and temperature change through the flow of ions that come from salt.
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