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Refrigeration based on plastic crystals

Materials called plastic crystals have been found to undergo huge temperature changes when subjected to small pressures near room temperature. Such materials could form the basis of future refrigeration technologies.
  1. Claudio Cazorla

    1. Claudio Cazorla is at the School of Materials Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia.

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Materials known as plastic crystals are composed of molecules that interact through weak long-range forces. As a result, these materials are highly compressible and can be deformed in a reversible manner — hence the adjective ‘plastic’. Under certain pressure and temperature conditions, molecules in plastic crystals can start rotating almost freely around their centres of mass. The centres of mass remain localized at well-defined and ordered positions in the crystal lattice, but the rotation leads to orientational disorder. In a paper in Nature, Li et al.1 report that the phase transition between molecular order and disorder in plastic crystals can be used for cooling purposes through the application of small pressures.

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Nature 567, 470-471 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00974-5

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