New Air Conditioning Revolution?

It´s interesting to follow the recent post that I wrote, and to know that there are new interesting ways to "up date" or renovate our air conditioning and cooling systems. As the previous post we were talking about new materials for "Creating" Cooling, at this link we can take a look to other way to do this. It is similar to how photovoltaic cells work,

Just Take a Look.

http://www.tetech.com/FAQ-Technical-Information.html#1

New cooling idea

As we wrote in a 2008 post, we can innovate over a new technology to deliver comfort and cooling capacity using "new ideas" for this. Please read the next article.

Your refrigerator’s humming, electricity-guzzling cooling system could soon be a lot smaller, quieter and more economical thanks to an exotic metal alloy discovered by an international collaboration working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)’s Center for Neutron Research (NCNR).

The alloy may prove to be a long-sought material that will permit magnetic cooling instead of the gas-compression systems used for home refrigeration and air conditioning. The magnetic cooling technique, though used for decades in science and industry, has yet to find application in the home because of technical and environmental hurdles—but the NIST collaboration may have overcome them.

Magnetic cooling relies on materials called magnetocalorics, which heat up when exposed to a powerful magnetic field. After they cool off by radiating this heat away, the magnetic field is removed, and their temperature drops again, this time dramatically. The effect can be used in a classic refrigeration cycle, and scientists have attained temperatures of nearly absolute zero this way. Two factors have kept magnetic cooling out of the consumer market: most magnetocalorics that function at close to room temperature require both the prohibitively expensive rare metal gadolinium and arsenic, a deadly toxin.

But conventional gas-compression refrigerators have their own drawbacks. They commonly use hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), greenhouse gases that can contribute to climate change if they escape into the atmosphere. In addition, it is becoming increasingly difficult to improve traditional refrigeration. “The efficiency of the gas cycle has pretty much maxed out,” said Jeff Lynn of NCNR. “The idea is to replace that cycle with something else.”

The alloy the team has found—a mixture of manganese, iron, phosphorus and germanium—is not merely the first near-room-temperature magnetocaloric to contain neither gadolinium nor arsenic—rendering it both safer and cheaper—but also it has such strong magnetocaloric properties that a system based on it could rival gas compression in efficiency.

Working alongside (and inspired by) visiting scientists from the Beijing University of Technology, the team used NIST’s neutron diffraction equipment to analyze the novel alloy. They found that when exposed to a magnetic field, the newfound material’s crystal structure completely changes, which explains its exceptional performance.“Understanding how to fine-tune this change in crystal structure may allow us to get our alloy’s efficiency even higher,” says NIST crystallographer Qing Huang. “We are still playing with the composition, and if we can get it to magnetize uniformly, we may be able to further improve the efficiency.”

Members of the collaboration include scientists from NIST, Beijing University of Technology, Princeton University and McGill University. Funding for the project was provided by NIST.

Creativity in crisis time

A German Campaign for the Sparkasse Bank, using the actual crisis time, it shows a strong insight message: Throwing your pennies to a fountain to ask for a wish. Do you copy? :” Wishes? Rather invest your money safely.

Now a days when we spoke about worldwide crisis, the opinions are very wide: invest, wait, to low expenses, discounts, strategies, etc. The point where every opinion converge is that 2009 woun´t be easy. Creativity will be helpful to pass this, using innovative ways to publish your “adds” or to communicate to your costumers, using furniture and media at lower money costs but at high “mind” costs. Take a look at what´s new, here I present these two brilliant ideas.

Got the big picture???