Cooling and refrigerating is taxing the environment and accounts for close to one-fifth of the world's energy budget.
Today these techniques rely largely on vapor compression, which while cheap, has limited efficiency and uses refrigerants that are greenhouse gases.
Aiming to come up with an alternative that is environmentally friendly, researchers at the American Association For The Advancement of Science were able to develop new cooling materials thanks to a 3D printer.
Researcher Huilong Hou and a team of colleagues created a high-performance solid-state elastocaloric cooling material by synthesizing a nickel-titanium-based elastocaloric metal. Elastocalorics is a material that when under stress transfers heat. The material tends to fatigue after repeated cycles of heat pumping. Their work was published in the journal Science.
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