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A new cooling technology freezes food without warming the climate (www.anthropocenemagazine.org)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Imaging if this technology could cool a data centre.

Edit: I was not involved in this project. You are wasting your time asking me questions.

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[–] 32 points 9 months ago (9 children)

That's thermodynamically impossible but ok.

When you cool something you take heat energy out of it you have to do something with that heat energy you can't just delete it.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Seriously this! I feel like that cobra chicken meme where I'm yelling

    "where does the entropy go?"

    "WHERE DOES THE ENTROPY GO‽"

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    You don’t overcome thermodynamics, but you can work around them. For example:

    When you cool something you take heat energy out of it you have to do something with that heat energy you can't just delete it.

    Or you can shunt it into space so that it doesn’t heat the atmosphere on its way out. That’s called radiative cooling and it’s brilliant.

    And it can be done at home with household items. See Nighthawk’s YT channel for more info: https://youtu.be/N3bJnKmeNJY

    And that’s just one out of many possible approaches. Interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_surfaces_(climate_engineering)

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    That's reflection of external heat not removal of internal heat. Refrigeration requires effort and therefore energy.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    I was talking about cooling and a practical example of “working around the rules”.

    As for refrigeration in particular: any similar mechanism can do this too. Example: if you can figure out a material that emits IR in the ballpark for that specific range of wavelengths, you can use it as an active shunt.

    Also read somewhere before (not sure when or where tbh, but it might’ve been an old school 2000s forum discussion or something) about a way to possibly achieve it via phase change cooling at a molecular scale iirc. It wasn’t viable at the time and we made light of it, but with the material science advancements of today? Who knows. Maybe someone figured it out.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    My guess is that it only moves the heat and doesnt generate more on top of that but havent read the article

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    That's also impossible. Anything that does work generates heat, it's a fundamental law of thermodynamics.

    There is no such thing as a thermally neutral mechanism, because all energy is eventually thermal. You can reflect heat, as in you can prevent heat from being added into a system via thermally neutral mechanisms but you can't remove it without exerting energy.

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