So it’s a solid and it melts, absorbing heat, then it must turn back into a solid, releasing heat. I’m curious to see how they move the solid back to where it started to complete the cycle. Maybe the material doesn’t move at all, it’s on some kind of revolving assembly? It’s just that in modern refrigeration systems, the evaporator isn’t necessarily that close to the condenser, so with a solid I can see this being awkward in some situations.
You have two of them or more in the assembly, you fully saturate one side, and desaturate the other. Then you switch the direction you pump. You have losses in heating and cooling the respective sides.
True, that’s pretty common in industrial and commercial settings as well. Though here I’m thinking more in terms of a residential setting. Relying on a secondary fluid loop would likely raise the cost quite a bit due to the extra components required.
They’ve raised the global warming issue about current refrigerants but what really matters is the economics of isocaloric vs. vapor compression because there are more modern refrigerants[1] that have quite low global warming potential. It makes that argument carry less weight than it used to imo.
Supplement material contains everything even the material selection method, what they used as materials, modelling results, and a design of the device used.
I figured they'd have to be infrared, and then I got distracted by the difficulties producing dots that large[1].
It seems that there's been some trouble scaling up to that scale (though scaling down into the UV would be even more problematic).
[1] - https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1500079