Activity

A research paper is published in the Nature Communications
A research group of Dr. Keita Nomura, Dr. Masanori Yamamoto, Dr. Atsushi Gabe, Prof. Hirotomo Nishihara, Prof. Takashi Kyotani from Tohoku University, Nissan Motor Co., Prof. Hideki Tanaka from RISM, Shinshu University, Prof. Minoru T. Miyahara from Kyoto University and Prof. Yuta Nishina from Okayama University found that refrigerant molecules adsorbed nanosponge (elastic material equipped with small nanopores) immediately get cool when the molecules are squeezed and evaporated by adding mechanical pressure on nanosponge. When there are no mechanical pressure, nanosponge automatically recover its shape and make heat while the refrigerant molecules are re-adsorbed into nanosponge. Applying this system enables to build a high efficient heat pump with environmental friendly water or alcohol as refrigerant. This research is published in the online journal Nature Communications.


“Force-driven reversible liquid–gas phase transition mediated by elastic nanosponges”
Keita Nomura, Hirotomo Nishihara, Masanori Yamamoto, Atsushi Gabe, Masashi Ito, Masanobu Uchimura, Yuta Nishina, Hideki Tanaka, Minoru T. Miyahara and Takashi Kyotani
Nature Communications 10, Article number2559(2019)
DOI：10.1038/s41467-019-10511-7