BALTIMORE - Korean electronics giant Samsung has teamed up with scientists at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland in the US, to develop solid-state thermoelectric-based refrigeration technology that will be a viable alternative to compressor-based refrigeration being used worldwide today, Ameya Paleja writes for Interesting Engineering.
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The Military & Aerospace Electronics take:
23 May 2025 -The researchers released their repot in Nature Communications, and is available here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59698-y.
“This thin-film technology has the potential to grow from powering small-scale refrigeration systems to supporting large building HVAC applications, similar to the way that lithium-ion batteries have been scaled to power devices as small as mobile phones and as large as electric vehicles,” said Rama Venkatasubramanian, chief technologist for thermoelectrics at APL.
In the research press release, it was noted that using controlled hierarchically engineered superlattice structures (CHESS) materials, the APL team achieved nearly 100% improvement in efficiency over traditional thermoelectric materials at room temperature (around 80 degrees Fahrenheit, or 25 C). They then translated these material-level gains into a near 75% improvement in efficiency at the device level in thermoelectric modules built with CHESS materials and a 70% improvement in efficiency in a fully integrated refrigeration system, each representing a significant improvement over state-of-the-art bulk thermoelectric devices.
Related: Sandia National Laboratories tests using lasers to cool computers
Jamie Whitney, Senior Editor
Military + Aerospace Electronics
