welcome to Reef's webinar um Beyond Vapor the future of solid state cooling um can anyone on camera give me a thumbs up if you can hear me okay and see the slides excellent um well thank you all for being here with us today we've got great presentations for you um and we're very excited to jump in so just a couple of housekeeping um items before we do get into the slides um we have an option to do question and answer today um we want as much audience participation as possible um so we would like you to use the um question and answer tool in the activities area of your Google meeting um the slide on screen shows you where to find that at the bottom right hand of your screen and um if you click on Q&A uh feel free to submit anonymously or um with your name and organization attached um we will get to as many as possible we're going to try and leave at least 20 minutes for that at the end of the presentations um in addition to that uh we will be recording and transcribing in both English and Spanish um so this will be available if anyone has to drop off um at a later date on the reef website um in the meantime I want to just thank everyone for joining us and I will turn it over to um Kristen Teddonio who is a reef board member with 20 years of experience specializing in reducing refrigerant emissions and helping people save money while protecting the planet um she's going to be moderating for us today and she's got a couple great representatives from Pascal and Exrogen um Kristen led the commercial building energy efficiency partnerships at the US Department of Energy she headed sales and marketing for energy star and appliance programs and she consulted on the Montreal protocol kaggali amendment HFC phaseown implementation in developing countries for the world bank so she is more than qualified to introduce you to solid state cooling and our presenters today thank you Kristen thank you Jamie shall we begin with the slides all right super so for those of you who are here today you probably know about refrigerants refrigerants are uh the fluids and vapors that make our air conditioning technology today work but it wasn't always that way uh the picture here shows you how cooling used to work uh when we refer to tons of cooling in the industry uh that hearkens back to a day and time when literally we were talking about tons of ice that we would make or mine uh and blow air over to produce cooling well technology evolved next slide please and thankfully uh today we no longer have to do that so for the last hundred years or so uh vapor compression technology has dominated the market and the department of energy where I used to work has a very fun uh history of air conditioning for those who are interesting uh so 1929 room air conditioning systems hit the market and thankfully they don't still work like this or look like this uh but in many ways they still work like this next slide uh they work through compressing vapors uh which heats them up h and then expanding them which cools them down and that's called the vapor compression cycle and that cycle has pros and it has cons on the pro side it works and we have at this point over a 100red years of engineering experience making it work uh it's widely deployed there's no melting ice to deal with and uh with proper engineering and installation uh things that are not always the case uh it can be quite energyefficient on the con side vapor uh is essentially referring to that refrigerant the working fluid within the system and historically those working fluids have been leaky toxic hazardous sometimes all three uh and oh there was that one time that our use of CFC's also refrigerant nearly destroyed the ozone layer and the world had to come together to uh phase out those chemicals uh and today although we no longer predominantly use ozone depleting substances we still predominantly use the world over hydrofluorocarbon gases or um and for those of you who are in the know uh those are a major contributor to climate change and are beginning to be phased down next slide please so for many years next slide please uh people have been asking themselves is there a better way uh we'll go back to the slide before thank you right there is there a better way well it turns out uh that aside from melting ice or compressing vapors there are other ways to produce cooling and heating effects uh without having to deal with those substances uh there is electrocaloric and magnetocaloric technologies uh represented here by their superhero alter egos uh but that's the sense of electromagnetism can produce a a heating or a cooling effect um but today we're going to be focusing on two other innovative ways to produce cooling either compressing or stretching materials uh that exist in a solid state uh so elasttochloric uses mechanical stress or stretching to alter the molecular structure of a material causing them to generate heat uh and then veracchloric uh which also uh uses a pressure change and they are represented here uh by some leading companies within the field exgen and Pascal uh so these technologies have come a long way in the last decade um I remember when I was at the US Department of Energy's building technologies office uh a decade ago and we were investing in emerging technologies looking at at that point predominantly magnetochloric uh materials and it looked like things were going to take a long time but uh sometimes even us experts at the department of energy were surprised and things go faster than expected and I believe that this is one of those truly exciting fields builds uh so next slide please uh so not only I believe this investors are starting to pay attention we're starting to see a lot more momentum on the uh the investor side as well so a couple of quotes here from some of the leading investors that are investing in this space and I'll let you uh take a look at those to help inform your further questions next slide please so with a 1-hour webinar we don't have time to get into all of the fun and technical details but I'm sure that some of you would like to learn more so I wanted to uh provide some information here for a quick backgrounder uh people may want to take a look at the Rocky Mountain Institutees uh 101 it's a three-part series on solid state cooling that they're coming out with this year first part has already been posted and for those who are interested in a deeper dive uh Dr borga uh from Cintf and uh Arborg University pardon me I uh am a predominantly English speaker if I murder the pronunciation there but there is a wonderful English language document uh that was recently updated that presents a deep dive into uh solid state cooling technology and how far it's come and where some of the innovations are happening and of course you can always check out the reef website or join us uh for more information and for hopefully a recording of this webinar after we are done today uh next slide please so it's my pleasure to introduce you briefly to our two speakers and then I'll turn it over today uh we have uh Mr adam Slutney from Pascal Technology Chief Executive Officer uh we're very excited to have you here Adam thank you very much uh and Adam is not only the CEO and co-founder of Pascal he is a PhD in chemistry from Stanford University and he also did a posttock at Harvard University's center for the environment and during his tenure at Harvard uh he explored the technological and economic aspects of the clean energy transition which ultimately led him to found Pascal uh and secondly we have Dr richard Blackburn from Xrogen Technical Fellow a chartered mechanical engineer and fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers with over 30 years in product development uh in renewable technology and R&D including over a decade leading uh shape memory alloy waste heat to energy and heat pump system development so with that I would ask you to please take us into your technology great thank thanks for the intro Kristen i I think I I get to kick us off um so honestly I'm more here for the the Q&A than anything else so I thought I would keep my slides pretty short i'll just tell you a little bit about Pascal the specifics of our particular technology and uh and then in the interest of this being an educational seminar like what are the key challenges that we're going to um that we are dealing with right now um and sort of what the opportunity that we see is and then uh you know turn it over to Richard so um uh if we could go to the next slide please uh yeah so the Pascal is is a startup we're based in Boston uh about 2 years old now uh originally we spun out of the Harvard's department of chemistry uh really to commercialize something that we discovered there which I'll I'll tell you about in a moment um we've uh we are venturebacked primarily by um some leading venture capitalists and are currently uh in the process of building out a commercial demonstration so we've previously built uh what I would call a proof of concept system um and are now scaling that up to uh something that looks a lot more like uh some a product that you could buy um and I can give you some more details on that as we go along um if we could go to the next slide um so Pascal is trying to commercialize uh what is called a barocaloric solid so Kristen did a bit of an intro on this but uh I've got my own um so uh in vapor compression you are using the gas to liquid phase change of your refrigerant gas it's that phase change that uh you uh create by applying pressure to the gas that allows you to absorb a lot of heat and release a lot of heat uh and simultaneously increase and decrease the temperature of your refrigerant um in a baroric we're we're using a similar process so we're also using a phase change um but in this case uh instead of going from a gas to liquid we go uh from one type of solid phase to a different type of solid phase and as we've kind of drawn here on this slide one of those phases is very disordered um uh and one of those is very ordered so the best mental analogy I've I've been able to find is uh actually pasta uh if you start with a box of uncooked pasta uh it's dry it's stiff um if you go cook that pasta it ends up all floppy and loose at the end um and and that's sort of what's happening in our materials so uh when we apply pressure uh we can go from a floppy and loose state to a stiff state um and then when we release the pressure we can go back um and in the process this this material also absorbs quite a lot of thermal energy uh heats up and cools down quite a bit and so we can utilize that uh to generate temperature lift and and run a refrigeration cycle um just because Richard is also on this call I'll I'll highlight a couple of key differences so elastochlorics and derlorics work um pretty similarly the biggest difference is really uh in elastolorics you are only applying force along typically one direction uh whereas baraclloric you actually pressurize a fluid and then that fluid presses on all sides onto your solid um and and so there are pros and cons to each uh one of the big differences is that uh we can actually make use of pretty flexible form factors so we can take our material and we can coat it onto heat exchange surfaces we can work with powders uh because we are able to access sort of unique uh uh uh sort of uh hydrostatic compression so um if you could go to the next slide uh we're not the first people to think of barorics um or solid refrigerants in general um and Pascal was really founded on a particular thesis uh which is that the thing that has prevented um solid refrigerants from seeing uh actual commercial application is is really the high pressures uh that you need to apply to to apply to these solids so historically you needed somewhere on the order of a th00and to 10,000 times atmospheric pressure um to get these solids to transition and and create enough of a temperature lift uh for for practical applications um uh and as you might imagine building that system can be quite challenging although Extrogen has has done it um and it's also can be uh potentially quite expensive and so what Pascal uh uh if you could click again um what Pascal has has figured out how to do is really uh significantly drop the operating pressures required um uh in our system so before we spun out we were able to to lower this operating pressure by two orders of magnitude um and then if you click one more time I've got one more dot uh so recently we were able to drop this below uh around 10 times atmospheric pressure um and so this puts you in a really different uh engineering regime so we're actually able to operate our systems we're typically operating our systems now around 10 10 times atmospheric pressure um uh and that puts us below most vapor compression systems so uh you know a typical HFC might be going up to about 30 times atmospheric pressure if you're talking about a transcritical CO2 system you're going up to 90 to 100 times atmospheric pressure um and so we're well below that and most importantly able to take advantage of a lot of the existing economies of scale inside the uh uh HVAC industry so we can buy off-the-shelf pipes we can buy off-the-shelf compressors and pumps and heat exchangers that are all rated for the pressure range that we need and are are relatively cheap uh and you can imagine putting together a system uh that that is that is cost competitive in this pressure range um the way you put that system together I should say looks very different from a vapor compression system due to the ways that you have to work with the solids um but we can take all the same parts um okay so if you could go to the the next slide uh I'll just give you a sense of of sort of the the set of challenges that you encounter or at least we have encountered when when working through solid refrigerants so uh as I said we're in the process of uh scaling up from a a benchtop demonstration system so or sorry I should say proof of concept system uh and really that proof of concept system just demonstrated that we could move some amount of heat at the at that low pressure that we uh were talking about uh that's not the same as creating the entire temperature lift that you need or doing so at a reasonable power um and so the sort of set of challenges that we're solving now are really uh because our refrigerants are solid they are much more difficult to move than a gas refrigerant and so you have to figure out a typically a way to bring heat to and from that solid and so uh typically this is going to look like some kind of secondary loop system inside your ultimate system if you have to move the heat any significant distance um but figuring out how to do that heat transfer and doing that fast and efficiently is is is quite the task um additionally by their general nature solid refrigerants don't generate as much lift as a gas refrigerant um and and even in our low pressure operation that's still the case uh and so typically uh you know we can generate uh 20 30° of lift but often not enough for uh a full um you know the full application requirements and so uh we need a way to amplify that and there's several ways to do that um we need to a way to generate our pressure efficiently um and then you know these are new untested materials uh typically they're going to need to cycle millions of times over their useful lifetime and and so that we have to demonstrate that that is actually possible uh and I think uh uh it it is but we have to show that um okay so I'll just end on the on the last slide with um just a sense of where where we think uh solid refrigerants are are really useful um so be by virtue of using a solid uh you don't have to think about anything going into the atmosphere and so this has uh this can be a a zero g uh GWD GWP solution um uh there is a path uh although I think it will take a while to get there to high energy efficiency uh so solids have some inherent advantages there and and uh we we're anticipating uh you know somewhere on the order of a 20% improvement over vapor compression um in energy efficiency um and then additionally the materials that we work with are are pretty benign so one they're solid so they don't go anywhere and then two they don't have any flammability concerns or significant toxicity concerns and they they don't contain any pests um so uh some questions that I would be really interested in chatting with this audience about uh just to end out my talk um uh so we're trying to figure out uh given this set of benefits that we think we can deliver what is the right place uh to to to launch Pascal system and I'm happy to share my thoughts but I I I think we're not really clear on that at the moment and and would like to do a lot more work figuring that out um and then additionally sort of what are the other things that beyond beyond these benefits that that we need to be considering and that uh sort of uh forward thinking customers are are interested in getting so looking forward to the discussion later and I'll I'll pass it off to Richard [Music] okay thank you very much um so I'm going to build on some of the work that Adam's talked about there there's similarities with the materials but there's also a few key differences so we'll highlight some of those and um show you where we are in terms of elasticoric performance um so I'm going to concentrate on elasticoric side of things which as Adam says there's some similarities some differences so next slide please so we'll very briefly run through um the operation of these systems how they work um some of the limitations and what we've been working on recently um we've been developing these systems now for over a decade and we've had some very good interest and some good success with what we're doing um if you search for us online you'll see that we've had um some good interest from OEMs and some uh some good investment in the company so we think we're well set to be able to develop this throw over the next few years um one of the questions that always comes up is about reliability and fatigue life expectancy so I'll talk about that a little as well okay next slide please uh Jamie do you want me to switch over to videos on my screen for this sure sounds great okay I'll just share the video for you so if we look at the um the raw material uh we have a side to side phase change um which is exactly the same as we have with the um the baroric materials but as Adam mentioned we compress our material in a single axial direction um not from um all directions and the top left here you can see uh sorry the top right for you this video is a stack of shape memory alloy um elements and this is about 120 mm long in one of our test rigs just to show you the material actually being compressed in real time um we're compressing this material at up to a,000 MPa um in compression uh but the strain goes around 6% so actually when you see this material moving it really does behave as if it's made out of elastic uh when we're doing this what we're actually doing is we're instigating the phase change in the material and we have a solid to solid phase change but we're going from two distinct ordered um configurations uh we go from body center cubic to face center cubic and by doing this um we actually change between ostite and martins site in terms of the material structure and by doing that we absorb or we reject heat so that's where the heating and the cooling effect comes from from this process so the video we're watching with the material moving is quite interesting but you can see it but it's even more interesting if we put a thermal camera on that and what we see is that when we compress the material it gets hot we can see the heat being released from this and then if we release the load we can see that the material cools down in this case um above and below ambient so this is actually what's happening inside um a um elasticoric heat pump uh when it's running and what we do is that we switch the heat transfer fluid between the hot fluid and the cold fluid depending which part of the cycle that we're in so that's actually what's happening inside it and I hope that helps uh visualize that so what I'll do is I'll hand back to Jamie and we'll switch over back to Jamie slide deck so we talked about using compression the obvious thing to do and all of the early systems actually used um tension the issue is uh with tension is um the SN curve and the stress strain curve when we're using shape memory alloys or particularly elastic calorics in tension is that we can run much lower forces we can run about 200 MPa instead of a thousand but what we do is that we're exposed to the SN curve and there's a mountain of published information on using shape memory alloys in tension and generally what you see is that on the stress strain curves if you're above about 2% strain which you need to be to instigate this phase change you're limited to a few thousand to 100 thousand cycles and if If we're going to build commercially viable caloric systems even running at one hertz in terms of the cycle that's about 30 hours of running uh which is not commercially viable so this is the reason why I mean our very first systems were tension based out of interest uh but we very quickly realized that this was not going to be viable um the process actually is that when you draw these materials um or you roll them into draw them into wires or tubes or plates is you get very tiny micro cracks and inclusions in the surface of the material and if you run the material in tension they propagate damage or cracks through the materials so the micro cracks or the inclusion sites become large cracks and they cause the fatigue failures you can still have these inclusions present if you're working in compression but microcracks don't propagate so that's that's the reason for using um compression in our systems okay next slide please by moving towards compression um nitinol uh which is our main one which is roughly 50% nickel 50% titanium uh most of the development of that and the applications have all been tension based applications um for the last few decades so what we've had to do is kind of go back to the beginning and develop our own material um textures and structures in order for them to work efficiently as compressionbased systems and we've managed to do this um it's been many years with our own research team laboratories to do this um because you know we've gone out away from the traditional kind of research of nitenol materials but what it's given us is materials that work as viable heat pumps in solid state systems uh and some of the key characteristics that we're looking for um the graph on the right hand side there is a stress strain curve which is common for showing elastic chlorate materials so there's a lot of information in there and if you look at the deck afterwards you can look in a bit more detail but the different colors represent the same material being tested against stress strain at different temperatures and in this case that material is from five to 50 degrees C uh we've got materials now since that graph was produced that uh will run a wider delta t or temperature range than that but the key characteristics so we've got high latent heat which you need you have a base load of parasitic loss in any system or machine for running pumps and controls and valves sensors uh so you need a certain amount of latent heat in a system before it produces useful heating and cooling with a cop greater than one Um we've got materials that are 18 jewels a gram and over which uh allow us to do that um the zero strain degradation over millions of cycles is one of the key things I talked about 100,000 cycles in tension and usually you're finished by running these systems in compression with the materials we've developed we can run millions and millions of cycles and what we see is that the strain zero point stays where it started and that means you've got no plastic defamation of the material which means you have no performance degradation and we've got very high material cop over 45 in this case here in this example uh and again that's fundamental to having a system cop that's viable um or even out competing in terms of vapor compression systems so you've got to have all of these features in there and it's been an awful lot of work and development in order to get compression based elastic materials that can perform at the levels they need to to be competitive with the vapor compression okay next slide please if we look at uh a rather busy graph but we'll explain it hitcham Jorah produced this from his report that Kristen mentioned earlier hitchum's on the call so thank you for joining and this covers all of the published data for caloric systems um over the last few decades um it's a huge database and a really great effort to publish this but generally it was work that was done by academia um on limited budgets limited time scales so what we found is that a lot of the systems were low deltat t and they were low power um the heating and cooling power on this graph on the y ais is a log scale so halfway up that is 100 watts which is a small refrigerator uh if we're talking about heat pumps for domestic applications we need to be into the 2 3 4 kilowatt range and for industrial we need to be 10 kows up to 10 megawatts and above so what we see here is there's a lot of groupings with colors but the key thing I just wanted to bring out is that the purple dots that are at the top of this are the systems that we've developed and have led the development of over the last few years over the last decade and what we've really done is pushed the envelope of caloric material performance in terms of systems to make them commercially viable so the line of uh hollow purple dots at the top there is 10 kilowatts and above and you can see that we're the only people that have done any published information above 10 kilowatts in the whole caloric field uh and that's been our work to really push this into the realms of being commercial um and we've got DTS running up to close to 50 Kelvin and you know again that's where we need to be um you know this is an example of where we're going with it and barocorics are also sneaking up into the top right there you can see um with the um the brown dots there so you know these are the two systems are the two technologies that are really moving beyond beyond all the work that was done on magnetos particularly over the last decade okay next slide please so where do you think we can go near you know this is where we need to be um because we're compressing our materials and we're using very high forces and a lot of energy to do that uh what we need to do is we need to recover that energy and recycle it into the system and that's a critical part of this and doing that work input recovery uh is one of the critical factors for system efficiency and we've got systems now that will recover that inputed energy over 75% uh I think the patents are just in the public domain for that um if you have a search around for exigen on um the spasnet or whichever patent tool you use then you should be able to see some of the details of that um the material hysteresis in compression we've managed to get down to a very very narrow level um actuators which are where most caloric wires come from have very high hysteresis to stop accidental actuation that's a deliberate design feature of them but actually when we're talking about elastic heat pumps we want very very narrow hysteresis which minimizes the work in which makes the system more efficient uh we've got those hysteresis values way down which is why the material cop is so high um we need heat recovery in the system if we're going to run large delta t um the material on its own won't do that we need to have a heat recovery cycle in there that works almost like a regenerator in a sterling engine that stores the heat and then recycles it into the next cycle uh we've got those systems again over 80% efficient so the opportunity there is becoming less and less uh and we need these to have high delta T again to be commercially viable we have materials that run over 60 Kelvin a stage and you know we're going to push that further and in terms of scale we built a 60 kilowatt heat pump if you search L12 heat pump on YouTube you can see a video of that machine um that was built uh about four years ago now um by the team in Dublin um with u materials that we processed and developed in house and that's the biggest system that's being built at commercial scale in terms of calorics um and it still sets a benchmark of what can be possible so you know we feel that we've really uh we've proved that we can go beyond these few watts 10 watts 100 watt lab scale systems up into something that is commercially useful okay next slide please we've still got a little bit of a way to go in terms of systems um away from materials uh the graph on the right here the green line through the center of that is um 40 to 60% of caro uh and we've got cop on the left temperature on the uh the bottom there delta t and again the purple dots represent where we are in terms of existing um elasticloric technology so we're just getting close to that 40% caro line now and the developments that we're working on will take us up to the 50 and then beyond obviously the idea is that we end up above that 50% line which takes us up into the area of typical heat pumps which is where we need to be um so that's the targets that we're aiming at and uh within three years we think that's uh perfectly realistic um the materials are there it's not a materials problem now we believe uh we have fatigue like we have the performance um it's the systems engineering which is just about getting the efficiencies of the systems uh when we're moving this heat and this energy around in order to improve the overall system cop and E okay next slide please so there's the conclusions for the elastic heat pumps uh very very quickly is that you know the caloric technology uh the work that's been done recently and particularly led by Exogen and Pascal has really taken this caloric technology as you know the leading solid state refrigerant heat pump um technologies that we think are going to be the future and elasticorics like barorics offer the same features in that they don't leak the PAS free zero GWP you can recycle the material materials uh so that supports um circular economy as well the funding and the interest the fact that we're both here uh we've both um achieved um private equity funding for this um shows that there's interest there and it's been taken seriously by the industry and um the materials technology you know certainly for the elastic calorics we're working on you know we think we're there with that in terms of the performance the life and the stability that we need we've just got to get the systems work going um and slightly improve um that to get it up to vapor compression and that'll help us work on the other things which bring in the more commercial aspects opposed to engineering ones which are things like cost to kilowatt size and weight uh which determine the commercial viability as opposed to the engineering viability of these systems um you know we're pleased that we're at the stage where we can put a lot of effort into that now okay thank you thank you so much round of applause for Adam and Richard um and as moderator I get the luxury of being able to ask some of the first questions and then Jamie will uh choose a few from the audience and hopefully we can get to as many as possible so first question uh to Adam and Richard perhaps as well uh both of you at certain points mentioned that your materials are non-toxic no PAS are you able to share with us what your materials are so I think Richard mostly did his um for us I can share in a general way um so generally the materials that we have are organic materials so they're they're based uh they look very similar chemically to things like soaps and waxes and we can source uh those out of those existing supply chains so you know uh not necessarily always things that you can just buy um but usually you can get the one-step precursor to to to do that and so you know they're as bad as soap or wax uh when you uh think about toxicity and stuff like that interesting well hope to see these in the field someday perhaps soon and then for those of us who have been working on alternatives to say hydrofluorocarbons um there is a lot of talk about going back to natural refrigerants things like hydro hydrocarbons or CO2 which as you mentioned has very high pressures um and sometimes can be challenging in the field could you tell us a little bit about how you see ultimately your technology comparing to say natural refrigerants if they were to be commercialized richard do you want to go first yeah we candy yes the the natural refrigerants have you know certainly gained a lot of interest over the last few years especially with the phase downs that have been brought in uh it's one of those things that there's a bit of horses for courses here is that the natural refrigerants do work well in some applications but not others um they can struggle at low temperatures or bring in other issues like flammability and there's areas where these solid state technologies would be more suitable for those applications but I think ultimately you know the target that we're looking at is that if you could be more efficient than those natural refrigerants you generally um speaking have slightly lower performance than HFC's and HMOs uh if we can be more efficient than those then the argument is compelling to move to solid state anyway um through efficiency rather than um it it being green or zero GWP yeah well fascinating and a followup for you Richard what are the possible temperature ranges for say an elastochloric or electrochloric uh or caloric systems in general can you tell us a little bit more about that or tell us again yeah sure well I I was talking about mainly my presentation uh what we call binary nit eye which is roughly 50% nickel 50% titanium but in terms of the elastic if if we move away from that binary blend um the materials themselves the caloric materials will actually run from about minus 150° C up above 600° C by using different blends of materials uh we either introduce um turnary or quturnary elements or we use completely different brands like um copper aluminium zinc for instance um and move away from the nickel titanium blends uh it it actually it becomes more of an issue um like Adam talked about in his presentation is that you've got to move that heating and cooling to somewhere useful uh so it's actually the heat transfer fluids that start to become a restriction in that uh because you can't use um many conventional heat transfer fluids at minus 150 for instance uh so that's that's where the challenges come in with the very high and the very low temperature systems and the materials will do it but you've still got to get that somewhere useful i find this absolutely fascinating especially because even with vapor compression technology industry is already moving towards uh secondary loop systems using that coolant as a secondary fluid um to try and mitigate some of the challenges around increased flammability for instance uh you know uh we could go into more of that later a final follow-up question for Richard could you talk to us a little bit about performance opportunities and limitations for elasticloric cooling systems you know what barriers need to be overcome at this point to truly commercialize these systems to get to the next step uh I kind of uh touched on that you've got to get the heating and the cooling in and out of the caloric material and to do that very quickly is challenging because you need to do it fast in order to get the cycle time down to make a commercially viable unit like I talked about and that kind of one to three hertz is the window you really want to be in and it could be challenging nickel titanium for instance is a terrible conductor of heat which isn't ideal when you want to use it as a heat transfer medium so being able to get the heat in and out of those systems with good heat transfer fluids and be able to pump those fluids efficiently around your secondary loops are the issues that um are affecting or the main issues that are affecting the overall system efficiency and and obviously that's where a lot of our efforts going at the moment thank you and Jamie I'll turn it over to you to take some questions from the audience thank you so much um just a reminder for our audience members we won't be able to um open the queue for raised hands or respond to messages um in the chat if you have a question please submit it via the activities tool um that is shown on your screen now um and we will jump into Q&A based on popularity so um these are submitted by audience members and voted on by audience members um if you see one uh if you see a question that you'd like answered please click the thumbs up to upload it um and we will answer as many as we can in the time we have left um okay so the most popular question um getting more popular by the moment is how much retraining or retooling of the existing HBACR workforce is needed to support scaling of the commercial viability of solid state applications well okay so I can I can answer a little bit although I will say that we are not at the product development stage so this is going to be sound probably not as detailed as you want um one of the nice things about solids is that they don't move and so a lot of the things that we hear uh are like very big challenges from technicians etc you know tracking down leaks dealing with uh you know you know failing seals etc etc a lot of that stuff is is less relevant although you will still have to do that in your secondary loop system um but you don't have to do that at high pressure and you don't have to do that uh with a with a gas um in terms of regular maintenance you know the standard things will still apply you still need to clean your heat exchangers etc um but in terms of the specific interaction with the solid refrigerants our hope is to be able to develop basically a cartridge-l like system so if if you know our solids need to be refreshed you can come in you can kind of easily remove them from the system and put in a new one uh and then as Richard said we're we're hoping to be able to recycle these um as not necessarily from a cost perspective but just uh you know uh responsibility perspective um and so you can hopefully ship the old cartridge back to us and deal with it at least that's that's that's our plan but we'll see if we can make that happen yeah I'll just uh add a bit to that so the secondary loop side of things is the same so in terms of the service maintenance um factory tooling um there shouldn't be any difference there and in the system I mean rather like Adam talked about we call them modules and the idea is that we have a shape memory alloy module uh that can be inserted or removed into the system as a service item if it needed to be um and the rest of the system comprises at least in terms of the elastic uh our system is standard sensors pumps pipe joints um our fluid systems run at a few bar um so it's very very similar to existing technologies um the only difference is that we use electromechanical actuation um or electrohydraulic actuation uh but again those those systems are kind of carry over from automotive things like the old previous power steering systems when they used to be hydraulic um or from light industrial so the retraining that would be required would be somewhat but minimal excellent thank you um another question for both uh presenters which approach makes more sense for AI data centers and cooling the processor chips this way does this approach make sense at all for such large applications well anything that works at 10 kilowatts will work at 10 megawatt um in terms of the viability and the commercial aspects of it so absolutely you know the data center market is a huge growing one and certainly one of the targets uh we're looking at um our systems generally are designed I mean I mentioned modules earlier as a modular system uh which means that um by stacking up the modules um it's the same as adding larger volume of refrigerant gas into a system um our systems become more efficient as they get larger uh because things like the overall pumping losses in pip pipes and the pumps themselves become more efficient uh so actually to go to the bigger systems um is more favorable in terms of the efficiency yeah I'll just add that I think you know if you're comparing to natural refrigerants for this particular application it's not clear to me that there's a good natural refrigerant solution here the you know you don't I think you could have a megawatt propane system uh but you may not want to have that much propane flying around um you're very expensive servers and and likewise the temperature span uh you're likely operating a lot of the time in the transcritical region for CO2 and so the efficiency of that system is is going to take take quite a hit and that's the thing that the customer cares a lot about so I actually think it it it's probably not our first application just because of the size of the system but I I do think we can we can play in that space great thank you uh this next audience member says that they believe the US is addicted to lowcost high efficiency packaged RTUs and that they have seen a general apprehension for obvious reasons like cost to transition to different system architectures it sounds like you're both addressing the efficiency aspect how are you thinking of the architectural challenge and I guess if we can hear from Adam and then Richard yeah yeah so I I do I have seen the same same data of of sort of you know cost and and initial upfront cost is is really important um and that's actually sort of part of why we try to emphasize the low pressure operation and our I don't I can't prove it to you yet but like our our thesis is basically that uh that will enable us to be cost competitive because we're basically buying the same components um uh I do think that there's a little bit of especially you know as we get more sophisticated there is room for that to perhaps relax uh you know you saw similar trends in in stuff like solar where uh you know in the first couple years upfront cost was a huge prohibition to adoption but then people developed financing tools because there was an obvious payback period um and so you know I'm not I don't I don't know where in that region we'll be but I think uh you know if we can hit uh reasonable payback periods then the financing options will could become available so and from an architectural standpoint are you focusing also on things like fitting within existing footprints or weight um so it can be on roof yeah yeah that's uh we're we're trying very hard to fit into those existing uh buckets so [Music] yeah and just to add to that actually myself and Adam were having a discussion about this earlier in the week and the the consumer market for the small units is probably not the area where we'd concentrate for very first take up of these units because it's the one that's uh more capex conscious um if we're talking about the 10 kilowatt plus systems where the efficiency really comes into this uh which are the commercial and industrial purchases and users they're looking at the longer term payback and overall um life cycle cost of ownership and in terms of getting the efficiencies of the systems to vapor compression or better there then becomes a compelling argument to move towards solid state um and the reason being that over a five or a 10-year period it's actually the opex that's absolutely the dominant factor within this and uh if you're making a commercial industrial decision you're more likely to take that into account so a a few percent on the cooper of a system uh will easily um dominate the um the equation in terms of if your system may be a few% more expensive in terms of capex so I think you know I just rather like the solar thing you you need to be careful of the target markets you want to go at initially and if you carefully select those then um you can make sure that you're in the area you need to be to get volume into the market to get market confidence to get confidence in the financing systems and then you can filter your way down through the systems into um you know ultimately to the small scale you know roombased units which uh you know really are the um the ones that are more capex conscious um so this is a related question um and Richard we can stay with you and then go back to Adam what markets residential commercial industrial and application type comfort cooling refrigeration mobile do you see as the biggest opportunity right now in the US and are there examples from outside the US where these solid state technologies are commercially being used currently are that the worldwide market varies so much so the the US operates in a market which is in terms of domestic tends to be replacement because you have mature housing stock and you know pretty much anybody that wants an air con unit in the US has probably already got one so their their purchasing decisions are usually based on stress because their unit's broken and they need one next week um and uh the small amount that are going into new housing stock whereas if you look at a market such as China and India it's all first purchase because that market's just exploding in China and India for these units but it's so capex driven uh and then you look at markets like Europe which are in between the two of them and the so the US domestic market I don't think is a good reference for the worldwide market because of the way the market's developing there um probably Europe and Japan are probably the ones to look at a little more which is the electrification's coming through very quickly in those areas um because um you know gas is really being dropped off and you're changing gasbased primarily heating in those markets over to electricbased cooling and the electric based cooling rather than going for evap is going towards heat pump um and the same instead of going gas- based hot water systems moving towards heat pump based hot water systems um you know they seem to be where the markets are developing so I don't think I'd use the US as a an overall reference for domestic but the commercial side of the US of course is uh where more interest would be as I mentioned you know getting over that 10 kilowatt system size and getting into the the markets that are more dominated by um life uh life cycle cost of ownership as opposed to capex um that would be the more interesting market in the US for sure plus 10 kow industrial commercial in Europe um it's more towards the um domestic heating cooling and hot water so yeah I I I actually agree with Richard i think that the US is its own thing and then there are other places in the world that are sort of uh much more rapidly transitioning down to to natural refrigerants obviously uh the stuff coming out of New York and California are are pushing that a lot and and we're we're watching that pretty closely here in the US um if you want the specific answer about the US market the way we've been thinking about it is uh uh really that that refrigeration is a lot more um uh of an attractive place to start partially because of the way that the regulations uh around refrigerants are structured so the the regulations around refrigerants actually come after the the owners of the refrigeration systems not just the manufacturers in those cases so if you're a grocery store for example you have to have a c you have a certain GWP limit that you have to meet um and I I know for a fact that a lot of grocery stores in the US are um quite concerned about meeting that limit so uh uh you know if if we're looking to launch in the US market which I think is something that we're still trying to figure out um but if so it's likely to be in sort of those spaces of of of refrigeration because of that market structure great thank you um we'll try and do two more questions really quickly so get your votes in um let's see Adam and then Richard are there any impediments to these products in terms of regulations safety standards or building codes um this is a interesting question um because if you read the Ashray codes um or the other codes that that regulate refrigerants uh they are very clearly written entirely for gas refrigerants um and so I think there's there's an open question about whether those regulations even apply to solids um uh so that that's something that probably we need an answer on some way um one way or another um and you know I think if if you are interested in uh assisting in regulations like figuring out the the right way or like what set of rules uh solid refrigerants would would play under and this is this is sort of a general problem for anything that's not vapor compression um uh is is pretty important um uh I think there's nothing right now that says we can't go into the market be as long as we meet regular safety standards but um you know if we're trying to do a comparison uh on a standard condition between a gas refrigerant and a solid refrigerant it's not really clear how that should be done right now and so uh there there's some work to do there for sure yeah yeah and from our side so we're using a a mix of standards and regulations uh in terms of performance and system operation we use um like ashray and urvent and those kind of standards so we can do comparable performance testing but in terms of the actual equipment is that uh we use you know the standard electrical directives machinery directives and safety directives for general industrial machinery uh because as Adam said the uh the world of heating and cooling hasn't caught up with regulation for solid state systems um so we we're using a bit of both as appropriate to make sure that you know the systems firstly are safe and good to operate um but that we can compare them in terms of at least performance and that side of things with vapor compression directly okay excellent i think um due to time we will close up there on that question um and Kristen um if you want to say a couple few words uh to close out we will be sending um this recording link and um notes to anyone that RSVPd today so once again thank you to all of the presenters and thank you to the audience members for being here uh Kitson thank you very much you're all part of the refrigerant transition and hopefully you'll all join us in a solid state cooling future i'm excited to say that as of the moment solid state refrigerants are not on the controlled substance list of the Kaggali amendment to the Montreal Protocol so I see this as a beautiful opportunity uh for efficiency uh for energy and for climate so thank you Adam thank you Richard and best of luck to you and your company's plans yeah thank you everybody for attending Reef for organizing it thank you all