I feel like I can hear the Technology Connections guy take a deeeeep inhale and a long exhale.
this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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oh look another bullshit startup intended only to appear game changing long enough to enrich some greedy founders. im sure this will fundamentally change the world of heat pumps for the better. totally.
Barocalorics is a really important field right now. I don’t actually think this category of tech is bullshit based on the core research I’ve been following.
Maybe this particular startup is, but the field is actually ready for a breakthrough. We need startups to take the risk of doing an initial manufacturing run or nothing will ever happen.
This is the breakthrough. Now they need to prove it as a product and scale it up for manufacturing.
You're gonna feel real silly when you look around and see the rest of us all squeezing our new refrigerators to keep our groceries cold.
Omg what difficult to mine and impossible to recycle material is this breakthrough gonna take?
The only hint in the article is that it's going to be an organic substance as a plastic crystal. Their website claims that it's a powder whose elemental composition is exclusively carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. The difficult and expensive materials are likely to be limited to synthesis equipment and catalysts, with petrochemicals used to synthesize the actual refrigerant.
Probably petrochemicals.
OK, that sounds nice, but until it’s a commercially available product, I won’t hold my breath
Doesn't squeezing add energy to a system? In other words, make it hotter. My tiny brain can't break rules of thermodynamics.
Yes. You are always adding net energy to the system. That's why a heater is a self-contained unit (turns energy into heat) while an air conditioner requires two units- one to suck up the heat outside, another to reject that heat outside. It's not 'creating cold', it's using energy to pump heat from the inside to the outside. The total amount of heat rejected outside is a net addition- it's the heat sucked up from inside, plus the waste heat from the compressor.
The air conditioner (current design) works on the simple principle that the boiling point of a liquid changes based on ambient pressure, and that phase change (between liquid and gas) carries a lot of latent energy. To boil water with heat alone, it takes about 100 calories to heat a gram of water from just above freezing to just below boiling. But to boil it, to heat it less than one more degree and turn it into gas, takes another 433 calories. That means if you adjust its boiling point by pressurizing and depressurizing it, whenever it boils or condenses it'll suck up or release a lot of heat at the same time.
Obviously we want colder than 100c, so we use a refrigerant like tetrafluoroethane with a boiling point of -26c.
This gadget uses a similar concept. Instead of using pressure to tweak the boiling point of a refrigerant, it uses a solid that heats or cools in response to pressure. Then water carries the heat around.
Squeezing (pressurizing) certain gases are basically how air conditioners work. Under pressure, the gases can absorb more heat (think pressure cooker - those get hotter because they raise the boiling point of water with the higher pressure). Shuffle that pressurized gas somewhere else with lower pressure, and it can no longer hold all that heat and needs to release it. Tada: heat has been moved from one location to another.
It kind of works exactly the other way around. The high pressure section is where the heat gets released and the low pressure section where it absorbs the heat (cools down the surroundings).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vapor-compression_refrigeration#Description
Similar to a Refrigerator:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator#Compressor_refrigerators
Alec Watson (Technology Connections) would be disappointed in me
I don't know him. But learning something is never a bad thing. I guess he also thinks that way.
You're missing out! He basically picks out random technologies and stuff that interests him and explains how they work in an easy to digest way. Even if you're familiar with the subject he still manages to make it interesting. And he looooves heat pumps and anything remotely related to it.
Microplastics leak everywhere.
Very interesting stuff.
Cools when squeezed? Yes, I do.
"Oh, a hug? ~~That's cool~~ That cools I guess...."
Isn't this already a thing to some degree with sodium acetate pads?
That's a phase change triggered by a seed crystal (generated from a physical shock from the 'clicker') where the transition from liquid to solid phases returns the latent heat that was previously added to turn it from solid to liquid.
There is no phase change in this material, it remains a solid and changes temperature depending on how much pressure is applied to it.
Great more microplastics to add to the already fucking problem.
Plastic as in plastic deformation, not plastic as in milk jugs. The crystals have a weak molecular bond so can squash and deform.
Even if they are literally plastics, probably way better* for the environment than the gasses used in refrigeration; and miles better than Freon.
*Assuming it works as efficiently
Also some plastics are made renewably and/or are biodegradable. It's a broad range of materials.
is this one?
plasticity
Except, what they're describing seems to be elastic, not plastic. Plastic deformation is permenant.
I think that's sort of the trick. They do the plastic deformation "permanently" into one shape, then they "permanently" deform it back. I assume there's some crystal lattice stuff going on that makes one of the deformations require more/less energy than the other deformation, and thus the heat created doesn't quite balance, meaning you can now theoretically transfer heat energy with it.
I won't profess to be an expert but I think they're often compared to wax for how easy they can be to deform which falls more under plastic deformation.
Not until it’s a real thing that actually exists. As of now, it’s just some imaginary bullshit to get investors excited…