244: Solid State Cooling? Dr. Ichiro Takeuchi Interview

https://youtu.be/zX-frOmbW00

On today’s episode of Still To Be Determined we’re talking about graphene batteries, as well as an interview with Dr. Ichiro Tak-ay-yuchi about how a shape changing metal alloy could be the future of heating and cooling. Sci-fi or Sci-real?

Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, How Solid State Cooling Could Change Everything https://youtu.be/GHl6buYjZGE?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ

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Matt Ferrell

Host of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, Still TBD, and Trek in Time podcasts

Host

Sean Ferrell

Co-host of Still TBD and Trek in Time Podcasts

What is Still To Be Determined?

Join Matt Ferrell from the YouTube Channel, Undecided, and his brother Sean Ferrell as they discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart technologies, and how they impact our lives. Still TBD continues the conversation from the Undecided YouTube channel.

On today's episode of Still to be Determined, we're talking about graphene batteries, as well as sharing an interview between Matt and Dr. Ichiro Takeuchi about how a shape changing metal alloy could be the future of heating and cooling. Welcome everybody to Still to be Determined. This of course is the follow up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell.

Once again, sadly, I'm not Matt Ferrell. I'm Sean Ferrell, sadly, I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, write some stuff for kids, and I'm usually generally curious about technology. Luckily for me, my brother is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which of course takes a look at emerging tech and with me as always.

You want to take a guess everybody? That's right. Here he is. Matt Ferrell. How you

doing, Matt? I'm doing well until that intro.

It's been a long week, Matt.

It's

been,

it's been a long

week. It's been a long week. We won't talk about why it's been a long week. But it's been extra long because I also have been sick the past week. I was just in Mexico visiting a BMW manufacturing plant. Got back and had a Mexican cold. So it's, I've been kind of recovering from that.

And then the other stuff, which will be, we won't want to talk about.

We won't talk about any of the other stuff, but we will talk about the hazards of traveling. And what Matt has not shared is I have become familiar with, uh, two of Matt's colleagues that he works with, two of his employees as a part of his company.

And we do a regular uh, bi weekly D& D session, the four of us, and we, and we enjoy our role playing time. And I've gotten to be friends with, uh, two of Matt's teammates and one of them attended the trip to Mexico with Matt and traveled from, am I remembering correctly, Poland? Poland. Yeah. Yeah. So the time difference.

Almost incalculable. The travel time, a ridiculous, I think it was 19 hours to get to Mexico and 23 to get back. And so Matt having a cold, well Yeah, I actually feel worse for the other guy. So do I.

So do I.

So usually our regular viewers and listeners are very accustomed to the rhythm of our show. We start off talking about our previous episode and then we go into Matt's most recent episode.

But this week it'll be a little bit different because we are making room in this episode for the interview that Matt did with Dr. Takeuchi. Which is about a new tech that the doctor has been researching at the University of Maryland. And so in order to make room for that, we will not be discussing our previous episode of Still to be Determined right now.

We will probably touch on some of those comments next week. We'll fold them in and have maybe a little bit of a longer previous episode discussion. So we can touch on the comments from two episodes that jump out to us. But for now, we're going to focus on Matt's most recent, which is of course, his episode why the U S military chose silicone graphene batteries.

And Matt, is this just another case of somebody slapping the word graphene onto a product and saying, Ooh, it's the future and the U S military going, Oh, we'll take it. No,

it's not just that.

And that's our episode. I wish it was

cause that'd be fantastic. So

quick rundown, just like highlights. My take on why they would see this as an enticing product largely is about weight. It is, if not entirely about weight, because what are the charge times like the, and the amount of energy held, like fairly comparable if I remember correctly.

It's, it's better on these.

The charging time is a little bit better. The energy density is a little bit better. Uh, actually a lot better because they are lighter weight because you can get the same performance out of a smaller, lighter weight battery, but like it's, it's safer charges slightly faster and it has a higher energy density.

So it's kind of like it ticks a lot of the boxes you'd be looking for, especially on that safety angle. You'd want a battery that's nice and safe.

Hmm. There was some interesting jumping in to the weight issue in the comments, I wanted to share a couple of comments that stood out to me. Like, Scaboodlydoodle, that is a harder user name to say out loud than Scaboodlydoodle may have realized when they chose the name Scaboodlydoodle.

So Scaboodlydoodle, wow, that's a tongue twister. And I'm also amazed that I got it right on my first attempt. I'm impressed too, Sean. Just saying. So, Scaboodlydoodle. Jumps in to say, there is no such thing as a light kit for a soldier. Every time a soldier's base gear gets lighter, the army immediately says, Oh, fantastic.

Now you can carry even more crap. Uh, and that was also followed up by solop, who jumped in a little bit later in the comments to say, Hey, At the two minute mark, some First Lieutenant out there, since these new batteries are lighter than the old ones, it means you can carry more of them with you. Always happens with new and lighter items, equaling more items to drag with you.

I think this is human nature, unfortunately, that you end up saying like, oh, we're changing this thing to make it lighter, smaller. Do this, do that. And somebody is like, which means we have room for the additional fan and the extra ice pack. And suddenly you're simplified, smaller, more compact version of a thing is bigger than ever.

I can't help but think of American vehicles right now as we, Oh, these new electric vehicles, look at how small and dynamic they can be and so much lighter weight. And there are more massive vehicles trying to find small parking spaces in New York City than I ever recall seeing. Anyway, that's more about human nature than anything else.

The goal of lightening the weight, this is, this goes beyond though what an individual soldier could manage, correct? Because this kind of battery pack could potentially be found in almost any electrical equipment that the military might want to use, which could include everything from a computer to a battery pack array that's meant to run lighting in a temporary shelter to medical equipment.

Like this isn't just what is Joe carrying. This is right. The entire, this could be

everything array, but, but the way where this is starting for the initial test is in just like something like the radios it's they're starting small. With more of that consumer level kind of like tech where it's like, okay, in all the radios, these batteries are going to be in there.

Test it, see how it works. And then they'll roll it out to more devices over time if things prove out to work well. So yes, eventually you can see this playing out is it's going to be in their laptops. It's going to be in their, you know, everything like you're mentioning, like the gear that the MASH units would have kind of thing.

So it's like everything's going to have this stuff, which could be charging faster, safer, Longer lasting, all those kinds of things, all the benefits that you want, you'd want it in all your military gear. But again, kind of come back to one of the points I brought up in the video, which was a lot of the stuff we take advantage of today, like the tech that we take, like, we don't even think about it, which originally seeded from military uses in the US, like GPS and all this other stuff started out with military purposes in mind and then just slowly trickled out to all of us and we benefit from it.

Um, so the military, I'm not saying the way that we spend money on the military is a good thing, not advocating that. Uh, there's a lot of waste, but at the same time, because of the way we found the military, there's deep pockets. And so they can afford these more expensive technologies up front for the R and D to cover those costs where a consumer tech company would not be able to pass those costs on the same way to like you and me.

So it's not like we're going to see these batteries in our tech, like. Next year, it might be five years from now, 10 years from now, we're seeing all this stuff trickle out. But the fact that it is actually going under testing now is really exciting to me. And the fact that the military is doing this, all the questions about military funding and spending aside, it's pretty exciting that there is a, uh, uh, a customer out there that can front the high costs of the upfront, uh, R and D for this to make it viable potentially for the rest of us.

Is this reaching a point of it being an almost negligible improvement? Have we reached a point where The amount of charge time or the weight of the product on the consumer side. Because I think that in my mind, when I think of like military gear that a soldier might be carrying around in a pack, they're going to be carrying around stuff that I'm not going to carry around in my day to day life.

Like, you know, some people do take a laptop with them to and from work or to and from classes or or wherever. But ultimately, most people are not carrying laptops around with them. We all have phones in our pockets, perhaps. Well, how much lighter and smaller can my phone actually get? And how much does that actually come into my mind as I'm walking around thinking on a daily basis?

Like, I'm not standing on the train thinking like, Oh, the lug of this giant phone in my pocket, because this is not a giant phone.

Yeah.

So I wonder, have we started to see an edge to the curve of improvement, which is maybe flattening out a bit in a way that makes some of these changes feel like Well, better is better, but we're only talking 10 percent as opposed to the difference between like the phone I have in my back pocket and the phone I had 10 years ago.

It, that's a good point. It's all about user experience, which is again, my background, but like for a military person, that's carrying 80 pounds of gear around with them. Of course, it'd be great to shave off 10 pounds of that gear because they have to carry a few batteries. So that makes sense. But for us, it's like, okay, how about a phone that's the same size as what you have today?

But the battery goes for 36 hours instead of 18. So it not only gets you through a full day, it gets you through the night and into the next morning. Or it charges in 10 minutes versus 60. You know, that's where the benefits start to come in for a consumer. It's not necessarily shaving weight off the individual device.

It's more about what is the user experience that the company is trying to provide. Like Apple has been kind of notorious for being kind of chintzy on the size of the batteries they put in their products. But they're always targeting a number of hours their products last. So it's like a lot of times people would argue, say, well, this Android phone has a battery that's twice the size of this Apple phone.

It's like, well, the iPhone lasts the same amount of time as the Android phone. So who cares? Like it's along those lines of like, how long will that phone last you the day? How long would that laptop last you through the day? I don't know if Apple's ever going to make a laptop where it would last for 48 hours.

I don't know if that's going to be like in the cards. They would be most likely to shave the size of the battery, which would reduce the cost of manufacturing each individual laptop.

Yes.

Less battery, less cost in theory. So it's like, makes it slightly lighter, but it's like for them, maybe there's, they're obsessed with thinness.

So they can make phones that are half as thick as they are today. So there's all these different things that would benefit us, the consumer. on however it's going to be designed and what people think people want in that product. It's not necessarily about, like you said, you're standing on the subway waiting for your train.

Ooh, you saved six ounces on how much your laptop weighs. You're not going to care. Um, but if that laptop lasts an extra day with no charging, that might be something that you're really into. So it all depends on what the customer's looking for.

Yeah, I think that sometimes though, it feels like some of these improvements are almost as much in the lab as the research.

Because it sometimes feels like, well, as you mentioned, what if it lasted 36 hours instead of 24? Well, I charge my phone every night when I go to bed. So A 36 hour cycle for me doesn't actually feel all that different. Right. And I think that's where it starts to feel like some of this, I guess you mentioned like we're talking five years from now, we're talking 10 years from now.

And I obviously will see what happens when maybe I'm not even aware, because I could tell you this much, I have never bought a phone thinking, but what type of battery does it have in it? So potentially the day I buy a new phone and it just happens to have a graphene battery and I don't know, or even really care, like that starts to become part of the lived experience.

And I think it's, I think that that is maybe also a sign of where this tech is living right now in the form of like, it's becoming almost so background in some ways that we stop even discussing, well, what is this? And making the decisions around what it is. And I'm wondering if you think there is a missed opportunity there in talking to consumers in a way that really does demonstrate a benefit beyond the wait, maybe, or the time, or the charge time. Like, is there a thing about some of this new tech? We're talking about these graphene batteries in particular. Is there something about them that you do think stands up and says, no, this is better and here's why?

To me, it's charging time.

That's one of the ones that's the most, I think, going to be appealing to people. Like when you're talking about EVs, you know, being able to charge your car in the time it takes to fill a gas car with gasoline is the kind of place we're trying to get to with EVs. So that, that's a very clear argument for something like a large thing, like an EV for something like a laptop.

It could be something similar. Like you're a businessman that's always got your laptop with you. You use it all the time. You're on the go. You may not have convenient access to an outlet to charge up. So if your laptop lasts longer, if you're a light user, you're not going to care that it would last you 36 hours to 48 hours.

But if you're a heavy power user, You're going to hammer through that battery really quick. So if it lasts you 15 hours or 14 hours with heavy use, you are going to care. So it's like, it all depends on your perspective, what your use cases with that product. So I think the communication to customers is, is, I think there's a mistake right now in, and I'm part of the mistake, to be honest, about how I talk about solid state batteries and things like that.

Consumers see these things about these battery technologies and put more weight on them than they probably should. Um, I was just at the Vancouver fully, uh, everything electric show. And somebody asked during one of the sessions, like, should they wait to buy an EV until solid state batteries are in the EV?

And my first reaction was. Why would you do that? Like, why would you wait? It's like, if look at what the car does, like, does the car have the range you're looking for? It does, buy it. Who cares what's in it? Who cares if it's LFP, NMC, or solid state battery? It's like, just if it fits the needs that you're looking for today and it achieves those goals, don't wait, don't wait, don't wait.

Just because there's some new fancy battery technology, that's got a lot of buzz, unless that battery and that final product has an, uh, uh, an angle that meets your needs. So, here, here's a car, that new car with solid state battery, it charges in 10 minutes versus half an hour, that, then, yeah, I'm waiting for that.

That's why you would wait. So, I think there's been a, there's a kind of a disconnect in how people like myself talk about the science and the fascination around how these things are coming together and the end product. So, I think there does need to be a slight change in how we're discussing this from a A more user centric point of view of like, why would you even care for this?

Or should you wait for this? Or does this even matter at the end of the day? Like you're bringing up, like for you, you're not going to care. You're not going to care what, what kind of batteries in your phone. It's like, if the phone lasts you the whole day, it doesn't really matter.

I think that that's an element that we've touched on in a number of different videos, which is how the media and, and you're talking about yourself as a part of the media in conveying this stuff. And I know that you come to this because of a fascination with the breakthroughs and the changes and the paths that are available and the evolution of these things.

And as you just said, that gets interpreted in a different way from the other side of consumer who's like, Oh, Matt is telling me that if I just wait six months. And you're not saying that. You're like, look at these cool guys in the lab. And they're like, well, I guess I shouldn't buy that car. Yeah. That's, it's a different thing.

Uh, and touching on the lab, one last comment that I wanted to share this one from Rick the Clipper, who wrote in to say, graphene can do everything except leave the lab. And we get it, but I wanted to give Matt an opportunity to like truthiness here. Like, Graphene is out there. Shocker. People are doing things with it.

It's left the lab.

Yeah. It left the lab years ago. It's actually out there and it's being used and it's being ramped up. But the problem is right now it's in very small scale. It's not in a ton of things and it's not in a ton of things that would touch people's lives. And that's why there's this feeling of except leaving the lab, but it, it does, it's already out there.

Like skeleton, uh, technologies makes these super capacitors. They have graphene. They've been doing that now for the past couple of years. And there are customers out there in the world using these super capacitors. It exists. And the nanograph testing with the military right now. So it's like, it has left the lab.

They are manufacturing these things. They are making these things that are out there in the world. The problem is really small scale and it's going to take years before it would hit any kind of scale that might start to come into our lives as a consumer. So there's a truthiness to that, that joke. Yeah.

There's also an aspect

to like, yeah, beware of marketing labels where you get that sticker stuck on the outside of the box that says now made with graphene. Because if you're buying A banana. And it's got a label on it that says now made with graphene. What are you doing? Uh, beware of the marketing speak that's just using the latest tech as a buzz to get you to pay attention to it and go back to Matt's earlier advice, which is, does the thing do the job you want it to? Does the car have the range you desire? Does the computer have the Wi Fi Capability and the memory and storage that you need in order to use it effectively and buy the products that meet your needs and worry less about, well, did this just come out of a lab and more about how do I use this in my life?

And with that jumping on now to Matt's conversation with Dr. Ichiro Takeuchi. He is a professor of materials science and engineering and an affiliate professor of physics at the University of Maryland. He is also the head of the combinatorial synthesis lab at that university. And his research focuses on combinatorial exploration and optimization of magnetic and multifaric materials.

I am so proud of myself for getting through that as well as I did. The reason Matt talked to the good doctor is because the doctor has been working on a shape changing metal alloy that can be used to create a solid state heating and cooling system. Yes, we're talking about the T 1000. No, we're not talking about the T 1000.

But based on Matt's description before we started recording of what this material can do. And it's potential, it's pretty mind blowing. So I hope you all enjoy Matt's conversation with Dr. Takeuchi.

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. I was really excited when you agreed to talk to me about your research and what you're doing around Elastocalorics.

My team and I have been pulling together a video around this because it's a fascinating area of research that seems to be kind of gaining some momentum over the past decade. And so I wanted to hear from you. Like, A little bit about it. Before I get into that, I was curious to learn a little bit more about you and what drew you to this field of study.

Good question. So, um, my, um, you know, central research focus is materials exploration, like finding new materials for a variety of, uh, topics and applications, uh, electronic materials to smart materials, to structural materials, to whatever. And, uh, so we had been working with shape memory alloys, which is the material that's used in elastocaloric, and, uh, for the longest time we were targeting, uh, stent, medical stent application of shape memory alloys, which is what these materials are used for.

In fact, that's one of the problems with elastocalorics is that, uh, The available materials are medical grade and as such they're expensive. So that's another thing we need to address down the road. But anyway, so we were optimizing materials for, uh, medical stent applications. And then we were kind of done with that project.

Then we were trying to figure out what to do next. And then we realized that there is this super elastic effect that's been known in shape memory alloys. And, uh, it actually releases and absorbs heat. And that was right around the time when, uh, alternative cooling, the concept of alternative cooling was becoming really important, you know, more and more of that is discussed because we need to eventually do away with hydrofluorocarbons and vapor compression.

And then, you know, we proposed to the Department of Energy, hey, can we try making a cooling device out of this thing? And that was about, uh, maybe 12, 13 years ago.

Wow, I mean, can you break down in the simplest terms, like, for a person that's just off the street, doesn't know anything about this, how would you explain it to somebody like

that?

Yeah, so, uh, what happens to this material is that it's a piece of metal. I don't have any with me, but, um, if you apply stress to it, you know, mechanical force pressure, then it changes its structure. You can, by doing that, you can make it undergo what's called a phase transition. So phase transition is a really important concept in material science and materials physics.

Many, in fact, it's same as, uh, ice and water. That's a phase transition, right? Ice melts to become water. That's a phase transition. So in fact, it's, it's very analogous, it's very similar to that, so, by applying pressure to this metal, you can make it undergo a phase transition, and then with every phase transition, there is this hidden, uh, energy associated with, with that transition phenomenon, that's called a latent heat.

So it's, so in other words, to turn ice into water, you have to put in a little bit of energy so that it becomes water, and then water to vapour, any phase transition.. So, uh, you can tap into this energy by artificially applying, um, pressure so that you can make it undergo phase transition. I don't know. Is that too complicated?

No, no.

It makes sense. I mean, one of the things Why is this, why is this a promising form of cooling compared to what we're currently doing?

So, um, so of course it's very difficult to compete with a vapor compression. It's been engineered for, you know, over a hundred years and everything is based on vapor compression, but the problem is hydrofluorocarbons, as you, as you know, is has high global warming potential.

So there's need to pursue refrigerants that, uh, not, has, has zero global warming potential. And this is, um, just a metal, nothing leaks into air, you know. And so therefore it's completely green. And the other important thing is, this process of applying pressure and having the, the energy released and absorbed back in.

When it's absorbed back in, that's when it does the cooling, by the way. So you have, that's a complete cycle. And, uh, it's extremely, it's an extremely efficient process. So, by applying pressure, right, you, we're doing some work to it, this input work, and then there's output. So, the efficiency is measured in, you know, something like how much energy you get out of it per amount of force you do.

So, if you calculate that, this process is extremely energy efficient. So, there's a good chance that if everything is put together, it could be, uh, competitive in terms of overall efficiency compared to the existing vapor compression technology.

Yeah, that was one of my questions I wanted to get at, which was oftentimes when you're talking about like HVAC systems in a house, you're talking about coefficient of performance, the COP, like energy in versus the energy out.

Exactly. Like, like if you were comparing this to like a heat pump, which might be a three to one or something like that, like how would this compare to a system like that?

So coefficient of performance, COP, you measure at different levels. And when you, when you buy a refrigerator or air conditioner and you talk about COP, that's a systems final product COP.

So we are yet be at a point where we could do one to one comparison. Right. It's difficult to, we're beginning to be able to do that finally, because after 10, 15 years, we're able to, you know, make something that actually resembles a, uh, gadget. You know, we have a big machine in our lab, which, which has enough capacity to be a small, uh, scale refrigerator, but so now we're beginning to be able to plug it into the wall.

And then do a one to one comparison with vapor compression, but we're not quite there yet. So this number, you know, you said three to one, so COP of three, right? That would be three to one is the typical number that's thrown around for vapor compression. So operate it under the same condition that at the initial level, it's much, much higher than three hour materials.

So what happens is every time you add a device heat exchanger, the mechanism to apply pressure. These things all consume energy and that actually consumes efficiency as well. So you, we could start off at 20, but then you add something and now it's 15. Then now it's 10. And then, so the question is, where can you stop by the time when you put together the whole thing?

That's

why you can't give an exact one to one right now because you're not at that phase yet.

That that's right. But our starting materials equivalent COP is close to 20. That's the same. So I mean, so again, that's just the material though. So

yeah, yes.

Understood. And you know, so, so the thing like, uh, so right now the material, one of the disadvantages of the very material that we're using is that it requires a really high stress, you know, nickel titanium.

It's, it's a great shape memory alloy. It's got great latent heat. Very large, you know, this large latent heat translates to very large temperature lift, which is what you want in any kind of cooling device or even a heating device.

You're talking about Nitinol.

Nitinol, yeah.

Right? So, um, uh, Nitinol, I know that's like, you can, you can buy Nitinol wire on Amazon, which I've done.

And it's like, you can bend it and heat it up and it goes back straight again. Or you can program it into what shape you want. Right. What exactly is your prototype doing to the metal? Are you compressing it? Are you bending it? Like, what are you doing to it?

Well, you could do either actually. And then, so it's, it's slightly different, uh, from the material that you buy from Amazon for shape memory effects.

So that, that material is in a low temperature phase. So, to do the cooling effect, you need to be in the high temperature phase. So you need to tune the composition of the materials processing so that relative to where room temperature is, where is this transition temperature. So the cooling material that are called super elastic materials are in the austenite phase, which is high temperature phase.

So the transformation temperature is below room temperature. And the idea is we, by applying the pressure, we send it from the high temperature to the low temperature phase. Okay. All right. And, uh, so, but, so, yeah, so we do either compression or, uh, tension, but, uh, compression is better because the materials last much longer with compression.

In fact, we've shown that, and other groups by now have also shown that if you do compression right, the material can last millions, tens of millions of cycles, which is enough. For, uh, the life of a ten year life of a, you know, commercial appliance. So, whereas if you do tension, if you do pulling, the cracks propagate and they, it fails catastrophically after thousands of cycles, usually.

That, that's the, yeah, that's one important, um, property to pay attention to about this material. So compression is hard to do. Tension you can imagine, or you've seen videos where you take a wire and then you pull. And then you can feel the temperature change. It's a great demo that fails after so many thousand cycles.

So, this is why we've been doing compression. And anyway, e e either way, when you have to apply this stress, it's so large that Right now the main technique is hydraulics. And hydraulics are great for elevators, but you probably don't want them in your refrigerators in the kitchen, you know. So, so that's one thing that we're trying to, um, do more material science on to find a new material that does not require hydraulics.

Oh, anyway, my point was, I digress. Hydraulics is an old, age old technology, you can buy one. And, but the thing is it's efficiency is very low, right? So, so it's something like 50 percent or even lower sometimes. In fact, the company that we bought the hydraulics from, we asked them, what's the efficiency of your hydraulic?

They said, Oh, we have no idea. We know it's, we know it's low. Right? And, and so the thing is, say it's 50 percent that directly cuts into our, our Going down process from 20. So say we started at 20, we now attach the hydraulics to drive it. It's down to 10 already. Right. And then every time you attach things, it keeps going down.

So that's, and that's the battle that we're fighting. So how, where can we stop? Can we stop at three so that then we can be competitive with vapor compression? So the point is we're, you know, us and other groups, we're been making these prototypes. And we're getting close to a point where we can actually begin to measure that.

And that, that's the really important, um, you know, reality check that that point is coming soon. You know,

what do you think is, is that the biggest challenge? Is that the biggest challenge? Is this like getting the materials science correct and finding the most efficient way to compress that material? Is that the biggest challenge?

Uh, that, that is the biggest challenge. I mean, there are always all these other engineering challenges. So the one thing that's been really an interesting journey for me with this technology is that it's, it's always been about having a perfect marriage between material science and HVAC engineering. So I, you know, I'm lucky because I get to work with, uh, some of the colleagues that you contacted.

They are experts in HVAC or any kind of, you know, cooling, heating devices, you know, how to design heat exchangers in this shape, that shape. And it's this, it's this marriage, you know, and without this, we wouldn't have been able to do what we've accomplished. And so we will forever be doing, you know, engineering new materials, but the same, at the same time, making better heat exchangers, better overall, you know, packaging and building the framework, et cetera.

So there, there are many, many challenges with heat exchangers, et cetera. But the biggest challenge is I would say the material requires a really large, large force right now with nickel titanium. So that's why we're trying to switch, develop new materials, switch to new materials.

So this is, we were talking about cooling.

I was curious because as we've been digging into this, is there any way to kind of use this in reverse to create heat? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, so every thermodynamic cycle of this type has half a cycle where it's releasing heat and the other half is absorbing heat. And so it's just like flipping air conditioner, you know, like it's now facing outside and then you, you, it's a heater now, you know, so.

So it

could, it could be used like a heat pump system then. Absolutely.

Heat and cool. Absolutely. So cooling, you know, it has been. You know, what's, you know, been with lots of attention, but no, like lately, you know, heat pump is a really important application. So right now we are funded to do, actually explore the possibility of, uh, using this for heaters as well.

Because anything to, right, wean away from, uh, uh, natural gas or, you know, fossil fuel. So even though this is still an early technology, anything that could produce heat in the winter time, you need to be able to do heat pump. So that's, that, that is definitely a serious consideration.

You brought up, and I, we came across this too of like, you've got vapor compression, which has been studied and refined for a hundred years.

And this you're only like 10, 15 years into it. How much more time do you think it's going to be before? We start to see something like a small refrigerator or something like that hit the market for something like this. I know it's really hard to kind of predict that because you don't know what kind of gotchas you're going to get, but I'm curious if you

have an idea.

No, honestly, we, we've been saying, you know, in next three to five years for the last 15 years, but, uh, we, we really think we're, we're getting close. So, so it turns out, you know, our good comparison point is our, um, sister technologies. And you've probably heard of magnetocaloric. You know, so that's been around since the eighties actually, and it's, and they had been few, you know, commercial products I heard, but, uh, right now there's one company that we know of that sells, uh, demo units.

It's a demo and probably efficiency is not great. The capacity is not so high, but finally there's something you can buy. So we, we learned from the sister technologies and we've seen what they've done. And, uh, we think we could be, be able to build something similar as a demo unit. And, uh, people would be interested, industries interested, because they all need to be invested, supposedly, in alternative cooling.

And, uh, because of this potential for high efficiency, Elastocaloric is considered, you know, one of the, one of the front runners. We still need to fully demonstrate it, but, so I think, um, You know, we just finished a big Department of Energy project, and we've gotten to a point where we are actually continually building new prototypes, so hopefully in the next couple of years, we have something to, uh, that we start thinking about, you know, selling as demo units.

You mentioned in the beginning that the metal is expensive, because it's like all metal, uh, medical grade stuff that you've got right now. Which means that it's a very niche, uh, I don't know, industry or supply chain around it right now. So, I'm curious, like, what do you need to tweak to the material and, like, what would need to happen to be able to kind of bring that cost down?

Do you have any idea

on that? So, um, like I said in the beginning, this is why we were looking at stents, which is a medical application. So, the medical grade is extremely pure. And to make really pure materials, it's super expensive and that, but we don't need that. We don't need that high purity. We're not like putting these things in, inside human bodies.

So, so we, we could, you know, dial back on the purity necessity of the material and stop mass producing then so just these two factors that we don't need that ultra high purity. If we can stop mass producing for this particular application, we think that would drive the price down by at least an order of magnitude, if not two.

Okay. So that, you know, that's always the analysis we do the cost analysis. Right now it's a medical grade things we're buying. That's why it's expensive, so.

So it sounds like getting the material figured out and dialed in and then also figuring out the compression system, getting that dialed in, are the two main things.

Are there any other technological or material things that are needed to really refine it further?

So, heat exchange, you know, we've kind of figured out how to do. So, um, yeah, materials in the drive, these are really, you know, and the availability of the materials that we already discussed. So, so those are really, you know, You know, the thing, the roadblocks right now, if you could get over that, which we're trying to do with new materials that would reduce the stress, and then we can go to a much cheaper actuator that doesn't require hydraulic drives.

So that's really the main point I would say. And then once the, uh, the, you know, the materials could be driven with cheaper and simpler like electric actuators, then we can start, you know, making a bigger device. So then that would increase the capacity as well. So that look, it's, it's really comes down to these two things.

Yeah.

What does your current device look like? Like how big is it? Like what,

what is it? We have a, um, device, which is about the size of a refrigerator. And, uh, it's, it's produced, uh, 260 Watts and, uh, delivered cooling. And, uh, so by the time we fully implement that into a regular refrigerator maybe will be down to less than 100 watts.

So that would be, um, a refrigerator, uh, large, but that's, uh, you know, 100 watt would be a refrigerator. So that's, yeah, that's

very competitive for a refrigerator that size. Yeah. So what, okay. So Taking 10, 15 years to get to where you are now, what are the next, like, big steps for your team? What are the next things you're working on like right now?

Oh, so we are, we want to make, uh, so this refrigerator we built, which is kind of big, I mean, you know, like this big, we want to make a compact one, given that it's a hundred watt, uh, you know, nice compact, like a tabletop refrigerator, it would be nice. We are, you know, in terms of applications, we always talk about wine cooler, because wine cooler is a smallish capacity refrigerator, right?

In particular, red wine cooler, because white wine needs to be chilled all the way. But, you know, red wine cooler is just kind of maintained to cool, right? So, so red wine cooler is what we're trying to demonstrate. And you know, that we, we think we can do, build a tabletop one in the next couple of years.

Are there any specific industries that come to mind or sectors, because we've talked about refrigerators and like air conditioners, are there any other industries or specific sectors that you think would be interested in elastocalorics?

Yeah. So, I mean, just in general, you know, again, because of this need to, you know, do away with hydrofluorocarbons.

I think, and you know, unfortunately there's not too many alternatives. I mean, different countries and sectors are looking at different natural materials, hydrocarbons, ammonia, water, CO2, even, you know, these things are all thrown around, but. I think they also want to be thinking about solid state, which is what we do, and it's completely green and, uh, you know, it's zero global warming potential.

So, um, I think it's something that people should at least look at. And so if you have a demo unit, I would think industry would want to check it out.

You're one of the experts in the field, which is why we reach out to you. What advice would you give to any young researchers or engineers that are interested in this kind of technology, uh, or just want to get into this kind of study?

What would you, advice would you give them?

Um, it, it takes time. It really, every time we make a progress, you know, one step, we find five problems that we all, it takes a year to iron them out. And we make another progress. And then we find all these issues and that's always true, I suppose, with, uh, you're working toward the final engineering product, but, uh, one needs to be prepared for that.

And really every step of the way encounters so many issues, just, just things like, you know, fundamentally it's a mechanical device, right? Our thing, because we're applying pressure. So it turns out if you make a big mechanical device, it generates heat. And heat is not good when you're trying to do cooling, you know, I learned that I experienced it, you know, so, okay.

So one, one thing is, yes, um, Again, this, uh, perfect marriage between material science and spec engineering or mechanical engineering. You, you really need both. You can, you need a complete team to approach this. We're constantly going back and forth. Overcome this challenge in mechanical thing. Oh, now we need a better material.

We have a better material. Well, now we need to do something else on the stress application side. So, You need to have a diverse team. I think that's the thing that really helped us from the beginning and even now. I

mean, that's even good to know for people who are not going to be going into this research, just like people on the outside, like myself, it's kind of like understanding.

Sometimes it's one step forward, two steps back. It's you don't know what you don't know until you try it. And then you discover. So you could say, Oh, it'll be three to five years from now. But in that three to five years, you may have found a dozen things you didn't know about that you have to address, which extends that timeline out.

Right. So, you know, we want to commercialize it. And, you know. I have a startup company on this, but frankly, it just takes time. I mean, I don't see how if people threw millions at us, I don't see how we could have done it. Maybe we could have done it a little bit faster. It just takes time. You have to go through these, you know, learning curves, the lessons.

So, um, yeah, I think, understand that you cannot rush these things is I think another important thing.

One last question for you. You're, this, we're talking about elastocalorics, but are there other studies that you're doing that are, might be in related kind of areas? Like what else are you doing?

Um, well, so, I mean, I, I do, you know, various completely different things, but like I said, my main field is, uh, materials discovery, materials exploration, and, uh, these days the AI is all the rage and, uh, so we, we do a lot of that.

We, we apply AI to, uh help guide us to, you know, better material. Interesting.

So you run simulations on different kind of makeups for the material and see how it will perform to give you a guidance on what to try and what not to try.

Right. So, well, it's, it's, uh, machine learning. So, you know, over the years we've worked with so many different materials that we have a database.

And so we apply machine learning to that. And. You know, with any luck, a good machine learning model will give us a prediction as to what new materials we should make. And that would have a good performance in terms of this latent heat and the tunability of the temperature and all that. So that's something that we're doing, we're applying to this field as well.

Have you gotten much results out of it? Because I'm curious, like, how long it would have taken 10 years ago to come up with new stuff versus being able to apply machine learning to it? Does it actually accelerate how quickly you can iterate through things?

Well, I think we're at a point where we're beginning to get some results and predictions. The, the, but the problem with, uh, machine learning is that it's a statistical process. So you need lots of data points. The more data points you have, the better. So again, you know, 10 years, 10, 12 years into this thing, now we have lots of, uh, data points in the Excel sheet, and now it makes sense to apply machine learning before it wouldn't have made sense.

Is there anything we haven't touched on with elastocalorics that you think would be good to know?

You know. Watch us in the next couple of years. We hope to have something that's, uh, commercializable.

I will be. Yeah. Trust me. I'm very excited about this. Again, I appreciate your time so much.

Thank you. So thank you to the doctor for sitting down with Matt and listeners.

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