Barocal can cool your food and drink by pressing a bunch of plastic crystals

Refrigerators today operate on the same basic technology as they did more than 100 years ago. You would think we would have come up with something better by now.

And we have, but nothing has been able to take the reigns of cheap, reliable vapor pressure – the process that keeps your milk cold today. One startup hopes to change that.

Barocal has invented a completely new way of heating and cooling using nothing but inexpensive solids. The first prototypes are already as efficient as existing refrigeration compressors, and the technology promises to use much less energy. Oh, and there’s no risk of greenhouse gas leaks, something that attacks vapor pressure.

To prepare the technology for market, Barocal has raised a 10 million seed round, the startup told TechCrunch exclusively. Investors in this round include The World Fund, Breakthrough Energy Discovery, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures and IP Group.

Barocal’s core technology stems from research by Xavier Moya, the startup’s founder. “I’ve always been very interested in heating and cooling technology,” he told TechCrunch. He traces it back to his youth in Spain, where he spent hours studying in a small, hot room. “I really remember when the air conditioning came in the house – it was like wow!” he remembered.

As a professor of materials physics at the University of Cambridge, he focused on refrigeration of all kinds, although he was particularly attracted to solid materials that could hold and release heat simply by squeezing and stretching them. In one of his favorite demonstrations, he asks people to take a melted balloon, put it to their lips, and then repeatedly stretch and relax it.

“If you light it, it’s hot. And then if you wait, if you let it go, it feels cold,” he said.

That principle applies to the Barocal class of materials, which are related to organic materials widely used in many industries, from plastics to paints. In general, the molecules inside the material rotate freely. But when they are compressed, the molecules stop rotating. Since heat, at its most basic level, is the movement of atoms and molecules, slowing down that movement causes the material to release heat. Removing pressure allows materials to absorb heat.

Barocal uses these materials to transfer heat. In a refrigerator, for example, equipment will pump heat from the inside of the refrigerator to the outside, lowering the temperature of the food inside. To transfer heat, the company flows water past the material and out into the radiator.

Because the materials used are solid, gas leaks are not a problem. In conventional refrigerators, gas refrigerants later deplete ozone or warm the climate, depending on the type. Greenhouse gas-based refrigerators have become a major problem as they can warm the climate more than 1,000 times more than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.

Although Barocal’s technology can work on any scale, the company is studying large HVAC and refrigeration first, systems where the efficiency gains of the implementation will make a noticeable dent in the customer’s bottom line. “We are looking at large commercial programs where I think we can make a big impact quickly,” said Moya.