Open Porous Metal Fiber Structures for the Next Generation of Sorption-Driven Heat Pumps and Cooling Machines

Climate change demands the development of increasingly efficient heating and cooling technologies. Salt hydrates offer interesting hydration and dehydration temperatures and energies useful for energy-efficient heat pumps, sorption cooling devices, and thermal energy storage. As past research on zeolite heat pumps has shown, the combination of active material with advanced heat exchangers based on metal fibers leads to superior power densities for heating and cooling applications. A current project, therefore, investigates the combination of such heat exchanger technology in combination with different promising salts, like MgSO4 or K2CO3, for application in sorption-driven devices.