this video is sponsored by roborock imagine a world without ice cream refrigerators or air
conditioning I know it's almost too frightening to even think about but none of those things would be
possible without this the unsung hero that is the heat pump but heat pumps have always been
more expensive than their competition at least for heating while that might all change with a
Next Generation heat pump technology that ditches the compressors and refrigerants in favor of sound
yeah this is the thermo acoustic heat pump and it might be coming to a home near you sooner than
you think I'm Ricky and this is Two Bit da Vinci. Heat pumps are something you probably spend zero time
thinking about but a lot of our modern world wouldn't be possible without them just take a
look at the population growth of Phoenix Arizona and Los Angeles California in 1931 Engineers H.H
Schultz and JQ Sherman developed the first window unit air conditioner A year later you could buy
one for between ten thousand and fifty thousand dollars meaning it was Out Of Reach for nearly
everyone but by 1950 prices came down to a point where they were much more common Los Angeles had
a population of about 4 million in 1950 while Phoenix was only 221 thousand it's basically
impossible to imagine this kind of growth in Desert Cities like Phoenix Arizona without the
rise of air conditioning and for fun here are the same numbers for Las Vegas the real magic
of the heat pump is twofold first they're really efficient want electric or natural gas heater
might be upwards of 95 efficient meaning one watt of energy use will produce roughly one watt of
heat heat pumps are on another level because they don't actually create Heat feet but pump heat from
one location to another they have a coefficient of performance of between three and five meaning one
watt of energy used can produce between three or five watts of heat this also allows them to
cool Spaces by pumping heat energy to the outside leaving the condition stays cooler whether it's
your living room or a refrigerator and there's no other device that can really do this for a more
in-depth explanation of how they work check out the link in the description for a video
we did on heat pumps last year but for all their greatness they do have some problems first they're
expensive and require specialized equipment and HVAC technicians to charge up working fluids or
refrigerants that get pumped in the lines there are some cool products like Mr Cool that comes
with pre-charged line sets to make it easier for us di wires which I'll cover in a future video on
my home series secondly this working fluid is usually not great for the environment and when
HVAC people tell you that your system needs a tune-up recharging any refrigerant that escaped
is one of those tasks now newer refrigerants were much less harmful compared to older varieties that
contain CFCs or chlorofluorocarbons that were tearing a hole in our ozone layer back in the
90s plus heat pumps and ACS have gotten so good and so prolific that they now account for about 10
of all electricity used worldwide and according to the iea that number is expected to Triple by 2050.
so there's good reason for future research and development this is the really cool part of the
Innovation cycle first time brilliant people come up with a brilliant idea that might be expensive
and Out Of Reach for the average person but slowly over time the technology just becomes ubiquitous
like Robot vacuum cleaners which are increasing in popularity at a staggering rate like our sponsor
this week roborock and this the S7 Max V Ultra I've had my roborock S7 plus cleaning my house
every day for the past year and it's been Flawless but the S7 Max V Ultra is an unbelievable upgrade
and here's why it has twice the suction power at 50 100 pascals rivaling even corded vacuums it has
lidar and Maps your entire house room by room and with the smartphone app you can clean everything
or just select rooms but now it has cameras and with its reactive AI 2.0 software it can find
obstacles on the floor and avoid them this is huge because my kids leave toys and things that would
get most robot vacuums Tangled Up and jammed it also has a dock that empties the dust bin which
other vacs have but this also has a clean and dirty water bin so the robot loads up on clean
water and mops simultaneously as it vacuums with Viper rides it vibrates the mopping head at 3
000 cycles per minute and automatically lifts them up when it detects carpet and rugs then when it
gets dirty it goes back to the dock where it gets cleaned and the dirty water is sucked up back into
the dirty water bin this is seriously mind-blowing and I've never seen anything like this this is the
absolute Pinnacle of robot floor cleaners you can even program it to charge doing off-peak hours
like at midnight to save you money so go check it out yourself today and between December 4th 18th
and 18th there's a buy one get one free deal for the S7 Max V Ultra links in the description huge
thanks to robarock and you for supporting the show and that brings us to this a pretty remarkable
Next Generation heat pump that is powered by sound or more specifically a thermo acoustic
heat pump and as the name implies a heat pump that pumps heat using sound waves sound waves are just
another form of energy and Thermo Acoustics is the interaction between sound waves and heat by
the way while researching this video I came across the most amazing video by Nighthawk and light on
his YouTube channel where he does some amazing experiments showing these principles in action
so definitely go check that out after this video at a high level here is how an acoustic heat pump
system works if you put a speaker like a big subwoofer inside a cylindrical cavity you can
produce sound waves that will bounce off the end of the cylinder and back but for this to perform
meaningful work we have to match the length of the tube with the frequency of the sound wave at most
frequencies the sound will reflect and interfere and bounce and collide with each other but reach
the natural frequency or resonant frequency of the tube and you'll have a standing wave that
stays in sync this is the first critical point and it is a function of sound frequency and the
geometry of the cavity inside the cavity is a gas usually helium because of its really good
heat transfer properties with no sound input the gas spreads out evenly and the heat energy is
evenly distributed an incoming sound wave travels through the cavity and increases the pressure
at the end where it bounces back think of like a bouncing ball that compresses as it hits the floor
before re-energizing and bouncing back so there is a greater concentration of gas particles and
therefore heat in this region and in the middle of the tube lower pressure and therefore less
energy but turn the sound off and the air just spreads out evenly once again the key is that the
acoustic heat pump needs to capture the heat at this compressed high temperature region in order
to develop a thermal gradient to move heat around interestingly there's also a high pressure region
at the speaker Source on the other end for the same reasons the reflection of the sound waves
next to capture this heat we need some sort of a heat collector or heat exchanger or a stack a
series of thin sheets that can absorb the heat in the gas without blocking the traveling sound
wave too much usually in all my videos for capturing heat we always look for the best
possible thermal conductor things like copper but that's not actually what we want here the goal is
to build a temperature gradient in the stack but if we use a great conductor like copper heat on
the hot side would quickly fly and spread back to the cold side faster than the acoustic heat
pump could create that gradient instead we want something that's a bit more of an insulator
something that does absorb heat otherwise this wouldn't work of course but not so fast that the
heat pump can't produce a temperature difference from hot to cold various companies will spend a
lot of money coming up with this perfect material that strikes the right balance but it can just be
as simple as a stack of plastic so with a thermal stack on both ends of the pipe we can essentially
double the working output next we are way to get the heat or cool out of the system and that can be
done with some heat pipes attached to the cold and hot sides some system designs combine the stack on
each end by attaching the hot side of one stack to the cold side of the other this cools off the
hot side allowing for even more heat to travel from the cool side to the hot side resulting
in a very cold stack and on the other side a very hot stack so that instead of a hot and cold on two
different places you just have one hot side and one cold side from here strong thermal conductors
like copper can be attached to the stacks to transfer the heat out of the system where they
can heat or cool depending on the use case again the beauty of this system is there is no working
fluid no compressors and the only moving part is the speaker and with a good speaker diaphragm
material such a system could easily last over 20 years with zero maintenance in fact equium a
French company developing a residential acoustic heat pump says their system can last over 30 years
with zero maintenance they also claim a carbon reduction of 80 compared to traditional gas
boilers and a seasonal coefficient of performance higher than a traditional high temperature heat
pump but there are some interesting challenges that acoustic heat pumps introduce a traditional
heat pump works via the changing phase of from liquid to gas of the refrigerant this temperature
where refrigerant boils and condenses helps Define the operating temperature range but in the case of
a thermoacoustic system it's really more about the difference in temperature between the two stacks
plus the hotter the hot side becomes the more likely it will just transfer the heat back to
the cold side via convection or the heat transfer through the gas so for this to work engineers
and scientists will have to master the perfect material that produces the biggest temperature
difference find clever ways to insulate the tube and even the two stacks and figure out how the
biggest temperature difference could be achieved while traditional heat pumps have been around for
decades and their designs are largely established published this is where different companies will
have different approaches to maximize efficiency based on different properties so because to keep
up in a lot of ways is like the wild west again where you know conventional designs
that have been around for so long have just kind of been perfected we're back to square
one and you're gonna see a lot of variations and different approaches that different companies take
clearly like 30 years from now the best technology will emerge but right now it's kind of anyone's
guessing game and if you're thinking what about noise levels are acoustic heat pumps louder when
they're running I was thinking about this too but because these cavities are sealed and sound
isolated and there are no large compressors to run acoustic heat pumps are actually quieter than
traditional heat pumps another challenge for the acoustic heat pump is the worldwide shortage of
helium helium is a pretty common gas but not here on Earth it's so lightweight that it just escapes
out of our atmosphere and there's been shortages of helium which some of you guys have pointed out
in our video on the Japanese hydrogen nuclear reactors and that is going to be a problem so
if you need helium now and yes it is sealed so there's really no risk of it leaking over the
life of a system but you still have to get enough helium for all these different heat pumps to work
and there might be some other gases argon has come up and there might be some others that could work
but you need something that can really transfer heat well so that is another limitation I think
acoustic heat pumps will make their way into our lives in the coming years but I'm not exactly
sure of the limit in terms of operating range and honestly most claims are just that claims picked
to illustrate where these products work best can it cool your house when it's 50 degrees Celsius
outside how much would the performance be degraded and with the coefficient of performance even be
higher than one because in the case of heating if it wasn't you'd be better off running a resistive
electric heater yes the benefits could be huge and I do believe that they will lower operating costs
and find plenty of use cases but I'm going to hold both judgment until I see the first
commercial products are available and when they are you can bet I'll try to get one and put it
through my usual testing maybe acoustic heat pumps finally usher in an age where homes are super
smart about how they use heat maybe excess heat from the refrigerator is moved into your water
heater and if costs were competitive this sort of heat management could carry out throughout your
entire home of tomorrow as mechanical engineer that's pretty exciting but let's not get ahead
of ourselves just yet what do you think there's no arguing that thermal acoustic heat pumps are
wildly fascinating but do you see a huge market and bright future for the technology or might it
never really reach that commercial stage of viability or something in between sound off
in the comments below alright that is a look at the thermoacoustic heat pump really cool stuff I
mean sound waves to pump heat around it's amazing stuff what a world we live in right all right so
check out this video next I think you'll also like if you like this one happy holidays it's
December depending when you watch this I'm Ricky this is a da Vinci we'll catch you guys next week