[ozyschmozy]

> A syringe pump pushes the silicone oil one way through the stack

This is better than the refrigerant cycle we're using now, sure, but I don't see how this is "solid state"

> “We can scale it because those elements we are using are already commercialized for other purposes.”

> For one thing, none of the present ceramics’ key elements are appealing for mass production. Lead is toxic; scandium is prohibitively expensive; tantalum is a conflict material in Central Africa and, Defay says, best avoided.

So it's not available with the current materials they need?

[Terr_]

> but I don't see how this is "solid state"

I think the idea is that there are actually two jobs going on, and one of them has been solid-state-ified: (1) cycling something between hot and cold and (2) ensuring emit-heat-to-environment happens separately from the absorb-heat-from-contents part.

In a regular refrigerator, refrigerant is pumped around doing both things at once, however we could imagine a system where there's two loops with a heat-exchanger: One small liquid+gas loop for refrigerant, and another silicone-oil loop.

[Karliss]

Not sure if that was intention, but fridge system can be split into two parts producing temperature change, and moving the heat. In a typical compressor fridge the gas does both, change the temperature by expanding/ compressing and move the heat by pumping it around. I guess the electrocaloric effect does the first half in solid state. With oil being pumped doing second half in a non solid state way. Isn't system capable of moving heat automatically a fridge? No- you can have a heat mover which is capable to only move heat from hot to cold like a water cooler in a PC.

[logtempo]

It's scalable from an industrial point of view, but it's not from a commercial/regulation perspective.

[scythe]

Heat exchangers are almost never solid-state. Convection is just way better. But the cooling element is solid-state.

[slashdev]

With elements though it really depends how much you need.