This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project proposes a novel refrigeration system that brings together three technologies that, up till now, have been used separately in solid state cooling systems: Photonics, Thermoelectrics, and Electron Field Emission. The project proposes hybrid cooling system that bring the innovative technologies into an architecture that offers the potential for refrigeration with efficiencies to rival or surpass what is currently available from small and medium scale vapor compression refrigeration. This hybrid system takes advantages of the strengths of each of the three constituent technologies while addressing the limitations of each: (1) the nascent field of optical cooling (anti-Stokes Fluorescence) lacks practical, manufacturable architectures, (2) thermoelectrics have suffered from poor conversion efficiency, even with recent materials advances, (3) and field emission cooling suffers from low cooling flux and manufacturable implementations. In the proposed system, optically enhanced field emission cooling is coupled with current state of the art p-type thermoelectric materials, allowing the notoriously under performing n-type thermoelectric material to be omitted. This innovative use of light creates an efficient and manufacturable thermal management technology for the microelectronics and refrigeration industries, in response to the solicitation.
The development of efficient, compact refrigeration technology proposed here has the potential to significantly impact the society in the United States and beyond through economic and environmental means. Risings standards of living worldwide and global warming are increasing the use of refrigeration, and the innovation proposed here, if proven successful, has the opportunity to lower the power consumption of small and medium scale refrigeration systems, moderating global increases in power consumption (power often extracted from non-renewable sources). The proposed solution contains no ozone depleting chemicals and has zero global warming potential, thereby reducing environmental threats as this technology displaces incumbent refrigeration technologies.
