EIC Clean and Efficient Cooling Portfolio
This section is dedicated to the projects that were funded under HORIZON-EIC-2023-PATHFINDERCHALLENGES-01-01.
This EIC Clean and Efficient Cooling Portfolio is a workspace where complementarities can add value to the work done in the projects, and synergies and collaborations can be established to maximise the overall impact on the results.
BEYOND – method for smart and affordaBle Evaluation of simultaneous faults in heating and cooling sYstems based ON compresseD vapor technology – is a pioneering project. It introduces a cutting-edge, knowledge-driven method for detecting, diagnosing, and evaluating soft faults in heating and cooling systems powered by vapor compression technology.
Our solution targets two critical challenges—refrigerant leakage and heat exchanger fouling—delivering effective management for more efficient and sustainable systems.
The CharCool project combines the use of natural energy and nature-based solutions to achieve clean and efficient cooling. CharCool is an innovative and sustainable heat-driven cooling system, where the excess of clean renewable energy or waste heat is stored in a modular thermochemical energy storage system that allows for seasonal storage.
CharCool challenges the current vision of cooling industry by proposing a system that is highly flexible and reliable, thanks to its coupling with a high-energy density (200 kWh/m3) and inexpensive mid-/long-term thermochemical material.
The aim of the CoCoMag is to synthesize, produce and test new alloys suitable for permanent magnets and magnetocaloric applications without using highly critical elements like rare earth and cobalt. This step is crucial to accelerate the electrification of our infrastructures.
Our alloys consist of several main elements in relatively high concentrations, known in technical jargon as high entropy alloys. This allows the properties of the individual elements to be fully exploited, which means that the new magnets will not only be more sustainable, but also with additional functionalities such as malleability and corrosion-resistance.
The Project SMACool will develop a functional air-conditiong device for residential buildings, based on the emerging technology of elastocalorics, which uses shape memory alloys as solid-state refrigerants for efficient and sustainable cold (and heat) generation.
Elastocalorics is an innovative, disruptive heating and cooling technology with the potential of reaching outstanding energy efficiency and zero global warming potential, using metals as solid-state refrigerant material instead of the harmful fluids used in cooling systems today.
DYMAN proposes revolutionary technological advances focused on the use and management of clean and efficient cooling in data centres.
The previously unproven technology that will be developed in DYMAN will enable the advancement and positioning of European cooling.
Frostbit
Refrigeration systems are responsible for tremendous global and EU emissions, making energy-efficient refrigeration an important energy and sustainability goal. Mechanocaloric materials are a promising solution for solid-state cooling. These materials demonstrate a reversible thermal change when subjected to an external mechanical field such as pressure or stress. The EIC-funded FROSTBIT project aims to develop the first functional refrigerator based on revolutionary solid-state technology using barocaloric materials in a regenerative cooling device. The materials will be synthesised for their ability to generate recently described significant barocaloric effects around the so-called spin crossover temperatures of some molecular complexes.