German-Japanese researchers invent electricity-free tech that could cool datacenters

https://image.theregister.com/230908.jpg?imageId=230908&x=0&y=0&cropw=100&croph=100&panox=0&panoy=0&panow=100&panoh=100&width=1200&height=683

How come that super-smart AI of yours didn't figure this out, frontier labs?

Datacenter cooling could get a lot more affordable, and sustainable, if a joint German-Japanese research project can be scaled beyond the laboratory.

Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the University of Tsukuba published a paper in Nature Energy on Friday discussing the success they had with a solid-state cooling technology that doesn’t need any electric input at all, and was still able to demonstrate temperature reductions in laboratory experiments.

For those unfamiliar with solid-state cooling, it’s a more sustainable alternative to traditional compression cooling that relies on environmentally harmful refrigerants and lots of electricity. Instead of compressing and expanding a gas to generate cold, some solid-state systems rely on thermoelectric materials that, when supplied with electricity, can generate temperature differences. Thermoelectric solid-state cooling systems can be incredibly small, but there’s a catch: They still need...

Copyright of this story solely belongs to theregister.com. To see the full text click HERE

Read more