Cutting the cold crank power requirement to 0 is also pretty nice. It means ACs with this thing would play nicely with solar/battery systems as they wouldn't require big current spikes to start.
Even more. My simple 100W fridge shows peaks up to 3000W when it switches on. Very short but sometimes my Shelly EM catches them (and messes up my graphs :) ). I can also see the lights dim a bit when that happens.
Even if it works I'm not going to buy a new fridge just for that though. Manufacturing a whole new fridge will be worse for the environment than running this for many years especially on green power.
However when it does go, it would be nice to have.
Please take a moment to go out on a limb and read the video description or watch the video.
The video is discussing a new technology from a company which purports to have come up with a more efficient way of compressing refrigerant in cooling systems, https://www.magtor.tech
Fair enough, I stand corrected. I think your link would've been a better submission than just the video specifically.
The submission lacks '[video]' and took me a couple of seconds to decide it wasn't for me, just in terms of presentation style even after you made it more appealing.
Can no longer edit, but the submission has been updated to remove the silly click-baiting ('revolutionary'), and to add '[video]'... I don't know if the flaggers and down-voters missed the earlier title so lack context, or what, but it's sorted now - I take no issue with the current title 'How can we make air conditioners more efficient? [video]', that's not what my comments above are referring to.
Was it? I don't even know what it was. YouTube itself is.. well it's at least arguable that it was revolutionary, but that's the platform, not whatever the first video was, if there even was a meaningful first (wouldn't you seed it with as much as you could from other sources?).
I don't understand the dismissal of content because of where it's hosted.
There is a large scientific community all publishing well researched videos. It's a free platform that has a large audience, seems like a natural fit for anyone looking to teach.
I enjoy a lot of YouTube content, I just reacted to the 'revolutionary' assertion attached to it. I'm not going to watch your links right now at least, but I assume they are not announcing breakthroughs, that they are great content sure, but following earlier press releases, publications, whatever's applicable?
I believe HN is quite efficient, in that I expect to see AC 33% efficiency boost in paper/startup/PR/etc. form. Then maybe the 'how it works' or explainer videos later, sure, but you can't claim 'revolutionary' at that point.
Someone else pointed out it is new, it's just that for some reason the submittor chose the video instead of the company site announcing it which includes the video.
The meat about the new technology starts at about 4:30 into the video, after some background on the history of A/C and how it works.
> Most modern compressors and pumps use rotary motors to shove a fluid from A to B inside a chamber, but rotary motors can lose as much as 30 percent of their output when they're asked to convert their rotary motion into linear motion required by compressors and pumps. That conversion is done by a crankshaft and once a crankshaft is in the system you get some friction losses but more importantly you get diminished efficiency because you're only getting maximum shove force in the middle of the piston stroke. The start and end of the stroke are both dead points where zero force is available to do any useful work. In a compression task you really want the maximum force to be applied at the end of the stroke not the minimum force. Overcoming these inertia forces every time the motor starts up requires a big spike in power demand which can be as much as five times the motor's normal operating consumption.
> The technology that Magtor have been quietly developing for over a decade now is a magnetically driven linear motor that completely eliminates the need for a crankshaft and achieves far higher operating efficiency as a result. Here's how it works. A fixed electromagnet stator sits at the centre of the motor. On either side of that are magnetic plates that are connected to each other via a shaft that runs through the middle of the stator. That connection effectively turns the two magnetic plates into a single moving part. As a voltage is applied across the electromagnet its polarity attracts the magnetic plate at one end and repels the magnetic plate at the other end. But because it's an electromagnet its polarity is changing 50 or 60 times a second as a result of the alternating current flowing through the copper windings. [...]
> You also avoid that costly power spike at start up as well. Because there's negligible mechanical inertia to overcome, as soon as an electrical current is applied the movement caused by magnetic attraction and repulsion can get going instantaneously. And on top of all that, Magtor have developed a very smart additional element that optimizes the motive power provided by the magnetic flux of the system. [...] In this working example a magtopressor is connected to a five-litre tank of air. Magtor's tests have shown that their device, which is smaller and lighter than a traditional reciprocating piston air compressor, can pressurize a cylinder 38% faster while consuming 33% percent less electricity.
I'm pretty sure some of the more high-end fridge compressors used by companies like LG already work more or less like this, with marginal efficiency gains but some improvement in noise.
> That conversion is done by a crankshaft and once a crankshaft is in the system ... you get diminished efficiency because you're only getting maximum shove force in the middle of the piston stroke.
I don't think that's right. Why would diminished force when the piston is turning around lead to a power loss?
Maybe it's an Aussie thing, but most air conditioners I've seen are based in the living room.
Most modern living rooms also don't have doors, meaning that these air conditioners are cooling 3-4x the volume of air that the owner actually wants them to.
At best, this wastes power. At worst, this wastes power and means the one room you actually want to cool doesn't get cooled properly.
I've lived in a unit with a door in the same room as a split system and it was amazing. The room would become completely cool in around 5 minutes, then the compressor would shut off and run for maybe 2 minutes every 15 minutes or so to maintain this cool temperature.
Canadian (Toronto) here, pretty much every air conditioner I've seen uses the same forced-air vent system as the furnace, and thus has outputs to every room of the house.
Definitely sounds regional, but also we air condition the entire house so we aren't winning the efficiency war here.
In my country (and most of East Asian countries I have been, like China, Japan, etc.) residential ACs are mostly in individual rooms (like this: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/air-co... ) . You would have one for the living room, one for each bedroom, etc.
Central HVAC exists, but 90%+ homes don't have them.
It's not as convenient and comfortable (one common problem older houses have is that there is no AC in kitchen) but the energy cost difference compared to the norm in the North America is night and day (the houses are significantly smaller here too).
From what I've read and seen in videos about it, that seems to be the case in much of the US as well.
In Australia you can get ducted systems, but at the residential scale it's both more expensive and less efficient than split systems. So houses will often have larger split units (5 - 10kW heat/cool capacity) in the main living areas and then smaller ones (2.5 - 3.5kW capacity) in all the bedrooms. Sometimes you have a multi-head system with one outdoor compressor unit and two or three indoor units.
This is even the case for large apartment buildings (often have a separate AC compressor for each unit), but most office and commercial buildings have central AC.
That makes sense if you actually want to only cool one room. Otherwise, you may want to have doors open/close independently of your cooling needs.
I've spent some time trying to turn a portable AC unit into proper AC solution during the recent heatwaves over here in Poland, and the doors were a problem for me, not a solution. For example, I work in a study, and my wife continuously moves back and forth between kitchen and the living room. That's already 3 rooms to cool, 4 if you count the corridor (which shouldn't cause you a thermal shock every time you navigate it). Which doors are best closed or open depends on whether our kid is home. E.g. when she is at home, my study doors are closed, and I get to cook inside.
I'm on a rental now, so I can't duct the apartment the way I'd like (also the reason I bought a portable unit), but on the next apartment, I plan to either have a split system with a terminal in every room, or a duct system for supply air from the AC unit.
I understand that for large homes, some rooms may not see much use during the day - but in apartments, I can't imagine such a thing, unless you're living alone.
Unfortunately the explanation of the A/C fluid cycle is haphazard and the description of how forces relate to crankshaft position is completely wrong. The crankshaft actually applies maximum force to the piston while approaching top and bottom dead center, when the mechanical advantage is greatest, and the least at mid stroke, where the torque of the motor is most directly opposed by the pressure of the gas against the face of the piston. This is good, however, because it marries well to the available power through an alternating current system.
The design described does seem to have fewer moving parts, which is good. But the advantage of linear vs rotary motion with respect to forces seems sketchy. Field strength in the linear system is likely to vary across the travel and would still need to be synchronized to the alternating current to prevent motor stalls. (Edit 50 of this comment: this effect is actually illustrated directly in the video here: https://youtu.be/2TFiL5BM3ss?t=348 Imagine the field lines directly correlate with force applied, and mentally plot the quantity of field lines over time as you watch the animation. Turns out it looks precisely like the force chart of a rotary compressor.)
The primary advantage of this pump, to me, seems to be reduced weight/complexity and lower friction losses. For it to operate with low starting load it would likely need to essentially vibrate its way to full travel (confirmed at 7:47 in the video), something rotary compressors can’t really do. If you try to restart rotary compressors too quickly after stopping, the high head pressure will stall the motor. This causes it to effectively be a dead short minus winding resistance, pulling much more current than average (known as LRA or locked rotor amps) with no cooling. This will heat the motor quickly until it thermally trips or burns up. This is why you will frequently see restart delays in A/C systems.
For what its worth, scroll compressors have been around forever and share some of these advantages, but aren’t dominant in the industry because of the additional complexity in manufacturing. They have an additional advantage of somewhat continous output pressure, which *significantly* reduces ambient noise and vibration. They also have fewer moving parts and are generally more reliable.
All of these advantages convey to standard air compressors by the way, something I'm a little surprised they didn't mention.
You sound like you have expertise, so could you have a look at his patents? I couldn't make much of them other than they looked familiar in some aspects and impractical/impossible in others:
I assume that this is pretty common in trying to improve linear motors - I am trying to get my hands on a small one to drive an air pump and it's just inscrutable to me.
I just have experience rather than expertise, hoping someone with actual expertise shows up to correct me where I'm wrong. :)
I love the idea of low hanging fruit in every dimension of technology, but the reality is that linear pumps have been around for quite some time and aren't dominant in any high (sales) volume application that I'm familiar with. That tells me there are likely some tradeoffs here that are not being explained. Vibration would be one obvious area, but could be handled with a harmonic balancer or an additional pump operating 180 out of phase (unfortunately increasing cost/complexity).
The other potential issue is that the motor needs to be built for the application for the most part. With rotary compressors, you can incorporate pulleys to gear the system up or down in accordance with the cheapest motor you can put to use. With this system the motor is the pump, so it's harder to add some kind of lever to gear it up or down. (This is less applicable to small A/C systems which tend to use hermetically sealed compressor systems, but for larger systems this can come into play.)
The cost is likely to be less important as time goes on and consumers become more aware (and caring) of the external cost to having inefficient machines.
Not to be trite, but cost is always important to the manufacturer. Tesla, for example, has been able to build a vertically integrated company through sheer will of its leadership. However, this is highly unusual and most product companies are going to want to invent as little as possible in order to ship a product. In this case a company wanting to sell an HVAC system based on this tech would have to develop the manufacturing pipeline to build these compressors vs. buying them from Copeland.
Now Copeland may choose to build these, but they are going to have to build the motor vs. buying them from one of hundreds of companies that build AC motors to spec.
Now one of those companies might decide to build these linear motors, but they are going to have to license the IP to do so, putting them at a distinct cost disadvantage vs. standard rotary motors. They are also going to be a sole supplier for some time, something manufacturers are very wary of unless it's a major differentiator. These are likely to cancel out.
Since you mention them - I wonder if Tesla might actually be an ideal customer.
As you say, they are vertically integrated, they are well set up to produce the full stack of the technology. They also need compressors (for air conditioning, and at least in their trucks for other systems), that need to be compact and energy efficient. The technologies at play (pressurized fluids, eletric motors and magnets) are all very familiar to them.
> In the Tesla Model Y, the heat pump was a true engineering marvel. Elon admitted on the podcast that he has a trophy rack of impressive tech his teams have come up with in his bedroom at home. The new printed circuit board (PCB) for the Tesla Octovalve was so impressive to Elon that he added it to his bedroom trophy rack.
> linear pumps have been around for quite some time and aren't dominant in any high
Every house in Japan with a small scale septic system has a linear pump for injecting air. This may sound niche but in fact large parts of the tokyo metro area are not on centralized sewer systems. Thus there should be at least 10M+ houses with such motors running continuously in Japan alone.
The pumps run 24/7 without maintenance for well over a decade.
Which also suggests there are bigger reasons not to use such pumps in AC. As any Japanese manufacturer will know of such pumps.
>Which also suggests there are bigger reasons not to use such pumps in AC. As any Japanese manufacturer will know of such pumps.
Yup! This reminds me of a similar pitch from a few years ago. When a Kickstarter went live for a small, quiet window air unit called Noria, people signed up in droves, thinking a startup in Philadelphia had somehow solved a physics problem that Johnson Controls and the companies it's sucked up over the years somehow whiffed on. This new device would chill the whole room, it would be quiet, compact, and most importantly, it wouldn't be heavy. It would easily slot into your window, and store under your bed in the cooler months when you don't need it. They raised nearly $1.5M USD in 2016, and in the last year finally started to deliver window units that were ... big, heavy, and noisy.
The physics of heat exchangers are very well established. It's wise to take any wild claims of higher efficiency with a massive grain of salt - someone missed something in their equations and it's going to come out during manufacturing.
Thank for the explanation, what about screw compressor? Are they too expansive to manufacture and need too much maintenance? How would you compare them to scroll compressor? I know they have industrial use, but I'm not sure why they are not more widespread.
Screw compressors are more well suited for high volume applications (like superchargers) than high pressure. This is because the geometry of the screws is difficult to sustain with very high tolerances. Small leaks aren't a problem when you're talking 10-50psi, but the 'high side' pressure of an A/C system is typically over 200psi.
My Dad made the screws for screw compressors back in the 70-90s... He primarily worked for joy/lovejoy, but also made screws for ingersall and a few others.
It was amazing to me how small the screws were for say, a shopping mall unit.. and how PRECISE the machining was.
The math behind the profiles was insane to, it was a 'self generating' curve.. You calculated a point on the curve, and that was fed in to generate the next point. Generating a new profile shape was a HUGE process... Wonder what it would be like with today's computers :-P
That's awesome! Seeing how wholly dependent modern manufacturing is on CNC makes me respect those early machine operators even more. They were constantly innovating on how to apply physical geometry and minimize incremental errors in order to build parts with tolerances that would still hold up today.
My Dad used to do a 'trick' where he would zero out a 6 decimal place readout on the big ground glass comparator..
You could then move the table anywhere you wanted in X/Y, cover the display, and he would bring it back to 0.0000X by eye :-)
He actually went to some institute in Sweden that did ultra-accurate measurements to show them how he did it. I think the 'trick' was, he moved the shadow till it was just past the blueprint, and back it off till a sliver of light shone thru, rather then trying to 'walk' the shadow up to the blueprint..
Neat stuff - but I decided on a tech career when I was mucking out the Holyroyd mill and he turned the cutting pumps on :-P Being drenched in cutting oil convinced me I liked computers better :-P
VW mass produced scroll superchargers 30 years ago for the G60 and they were unreliable but super efficient. Kind of surprising that with 30 years of manufacturing advances they're not more common. Such a cool design.
The comparison to a turbo got me thinking if some of the compression energy could be recovered in the expansion stage. Turns out the answer is yes, but the energy recovery is limited to 7% at best: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187661021...
> If you try to restart rotary compressors too quickly after stopping, the high head pressure will stall the motor. This causes it to effectively be a dead short minus winding resistance, pulling much more current than average (known as LRA or locked rotor amps)
Inverter based heat pumps and ACs that are already available on the market today have low LRAs as a consequence of their ability to operate at continuously variable speeds.
I'm worried about vibration. Maybe they should have two masses operating in opposite directions at once to balance out the vibrations. Maybe they will license my idea..
wouldn't that effectively double the cost of production? It might be cheaper and easier to invest in some spring based dampening.
Anyway, even in their video, the vibration is out of control, moving the pipes around and making it look like it won't last too much in real life applications.
You could probably do some kind of damped harmonic balancer with a simple mass on the end of a damped spring tuned for the expected operating range. Still increases cost but not as much.
I don't get it. This is just a solenoid. Solenoids have high "start-up" (saturation) currents.
Using the inertia of the plate mass at the end of each stroke is clever though.
I'd have thought a rotary electric motor connected to a rotary compressor would be quieter and easier to design the bearings for, and would operate in a more steady-state regime, so be more reliable. You also don't need the valve where the fluid from the two sides meets up, avoiding that efficiency loss.
I think the latest fridges (which are also air conditioners) use rotary compression.
Modern fridges and industrial electric motors have had "soft start" circuits in them for at least a decade. The start-up current thing is a non-issue.
Existing fridge compressors are ridiculously reliable. They are a close circuit, self lubricating motors. My grandma's fridge from the 70s was still running strong when we threw it out a few years ago.
I didn't quite understood how that new design is more reliable or serviceable? The closed compressors are literally zero maintenance. Also, the vibrations of that thing will tear itself apart quite fast, just look at their own promotional video: the pipes themselves cannot possibly last long with such vibrations: https://youtu.be/2TFiL5BM3ss?t=471
Here is what will happen with this technology... nothing. The company is an IP play where they have locked up this concept in IP and will try and force it on jurisdictions by various means of legislation to ensure they can get the highest prices possible for said IP. Incumbents will resist choosing to continue with current public domain technology. In 30 years when the IP expires it might possibly come into more common use. The current IP regimes are a complete disaster and are hamstringing human progress.
PS: Also scroll compressors are substantially more energy efficient than rotary and various means of staging is even more efficient yet.
> will try and force it on jurisdictions by various means of legislation
Have they said this is their strategy?
There are IP licensors (like ARM and the Fraunhofer Society) that sell licences to their IP without trying to force jurisdictions to adopt their technology.
> Incumbents will resist choosing to continue with current public domain technology
This would depend on the pricing of the IP licences and the competition within the market. If the licences are cheap enough and the market competitive enough that using this tech would provide an advantage, then incumbents would license it.
ARM sells... "intellectual property" that I might try to come up with a distinguishing definition from the IP of "one clever idea I want a monopoly on for a while".
A lot of IP boils down to an idea that you could describe in an elevator and a few good engineers could turn into a product in a few hours to a year.
ARM sells things that represent... thousands? hundreds of thousands? of engineer-years. You can't just whip that up in a short time, it totally makes sense to pay someone else for their trouble to make something... but if you wanted to and had a billion dollars to spare, sure you could do it yourself.
The problem with "I thought of it first" IP protections is the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery. A whole lot of ideas just have their time come, and tend to have multiple people working on them and coming to similar results in short periods. Making this a race and letting the winner sell out to groups that either want to extract rent out of the idea or to hide it in a safe to prevent competition for 30 years is not conducive to progress.
I patented a couple things just for the lulz, but in general I'm opposed to patents. I should have patented a couple others just because I kind of resent others claiming they invented it years later. But I can't complain too much, as I've also invented things that I later discovered I was late to the party.
> One was a method of texting that didn't require looking at the phone
Oh that's easy, every phone before iPhone could do it - you need a) a physical keyboard, and b) a soft real-time OS. Tactile feedback of physical buttons + stable UI configuration with learnable delays = you could learn to operate the phone without taking it out of your pocket.
:)
Joking aside, what was your invention? Could you link to the patent?
Thanks! I've skimmed the ones related to vibrations/Morse code, I'll look at the rest later.
At the risk of forever poisoning myself for related work, I guess. Whose bright idea was with that "you look at it, and you and everyone you know is now liable for 3x more damages for accidental infringement" law?...
The patents may have expired, anyway. One of the reasons I did the patents was I was always pestering people with those ideas, as I wanted someone to implement them. So they said "patent them, which will get the ideas out there."
The idea was to put a rocker switch on the side, to rock between "dot" and "dash", and then use Morse code. To "read" Morse, the phone could vibrate, or at least decode it as text to read. You could text without walking into a tree (which I have done.)
The graphics one was pretty straight forward. Instead of dividing up the picture into rectangles, divide it up into triangles. Set a color for each triangle based on an average of the color pixels in it. Then, smoothly shade the rendering of the triangle based on the colors at each vertex. This will prevent any banding or that ugly blockiness. The number and placement of the vertices depends on the where the complexity in the image is, and of course would be adjustable.
The browser one is to have the browser rendering prioritize where the mouse cursor is. Great for slow connections.
> The idea was to put a rocker switch on the side, to rock between "dot" and "dash", and then use Morse code. To "read" Morse, the phone could vibrate, or at least decode it as text to read. You could text without walking into a tree (which I have done.)
I can imagine this working. Kind of like CW for HAMs, except with a 3-state switch and couple dozen more layers of abstraction between you and the wire :). I wish my Morse code wasn't so rusty though - and it makes me wonder, are there better text encodings that could be used for such purpose?
The method for texting without looking I described was only limited to writing, but it's also something I've done in practice before smartphones, in particular on a Sony Ericsson K800i. This was possible because of good-quality keyboard (and joystick), and good UI decisions. I don't know if they put an actual soft-realtime OS in there (I suspect so), but all the UI delays were always the same - so I naturally memorized sequences like "unlock, menu, texting, wait ~0.5 second for it to load, open thread, type in message, send". It probably takes teenage-level or business-professional-level of use to get that kind of muscle memory, though.
> Instead of dividing up the picture into rectangles, divide it up into triangles. (...) This will prevent any banding or that ugly blockiness.
Is the insight here that a triangle-based subdivision like this will make areas of detail not align on horizontal/vertical lines, unless the underlying image has its details aligned on a band? Or am I misunderstanding this?
I've never attempted to learn Morse, but it looks like a few hours of practice should do it. Anyone can learn it, but I expect younger people would be more willing to do it.
> the insight
The vertices will be on pixel addresses. The edges of the triangle will have no discontinuities themselves, and the triangles sharing an edge will have no discontinuities. Hence, no banding or blockiness. A naive renderer would just render the colors of the triangle as a straight linear interpolation. A more advanced one could look at the adjoining triangles, and render it so the first derivative would also be zero across the line. I.e. curve fit it.
The selection of where the vertices go would likely be best selected where the colors are shifting fastest, i.e. an edge in the picture.
The neato thing is one could render a low res image on a high res display and it'll still look good. You wouldn't have these stray pixels scattered around the text like jpg does. The other neato thing is more vertices can be put in the complex areas of the image, rather than wasting bandwidth on the parts of it that are smooth.
Progressive sharpening of the rendering also works, as more vertices can be added at any time.
Hexagonal, equivalently, equilateral triangular tessellations indeed have many advantages over using squares. Your scheme reminded me of Delaunay triangulation and its dual, Voronoi tessellation.
I have a faint suspicion that your familiarity with finite element models had something to do with your choice of triangles.
That's right, simplicial complexes of the right dimension would give one the most fidelity in terms of continuity. Triangles happen to be the one for 2D. For 3D one would get similar benefits using tetrahedra.
I was alluding the fact that barring boundary effects hexagonal tessellation and equilateral tessellation are essentially the same.
> The method for texting without looking I described was only limited to writing, but it's also something I've done in practice before smartphones, in particular on a Sony Ericsson K800i. This was possible because of good-quality keyboard (and joystick), and good UI decisions. I don't know if they put an actual soft-realtime OS in there (I suspect so), but all the UI delays were always the same - so I naturally memorized sequences like "unlock, menu, texting, wait ~0.5 second for it to load, open thread, type in message, send". It probably takes teenage-level or business-professional-level of use to get that kind of muscle memory, though.
Wow, this threw me back. :) Indeed this was not only possible, but actually easy. I don't think it took a lot of effort or any conscious effort even, actually, the UI was so good, but most importantly there were no unpredictable delays and no unpredictable inconsistencies!
Why is modern software so bad in comparison? Sure it can do more things, but it does them worse. The interface of everything is constantly changing for the unfounded whims of designers who simply think "this looks prettier to me", things are not laid out logically, adverts permeate the interface of most products from phones to TVs...
I'm sure I read the Morse code one in a '90s science fiction story, although I think that was described as pure haptics; not sure if that would count as prior art for your patent.
> PS: Also scroll compressors are substantially more energy efficient than rotary and various means of staging is even more efficient yet.
PPS: Also the efficiency of a heat exchanger cycle has very little to do with the individual losses of the compressor components. Engine losses matter at the compression ratios you see in a combustion piston, but at the scale coolants run at (especially ones like in an AC that involve a phase change) it's almost noise when compared with the fundamental thermodynamic limitations. You can do a little better for sure; 33% lower friction losses seems reasonable.
But you can't do much better: the linked article is surely not talking about 33% better overall cooling efficiency, that sounds insane to me.
I agree about the 33% efficiency doesn't make any sense from a thermodynamic perspective. The discussion of the peak current for the compressor motor is quite strange. That is a fraction of a second that the system experience the Locked Rotor Amps (LRA). It is also solvable when a system has variable compressors or inrush current limiting.
One bit of reasonable efficiency gains to be had is by switching refrigerants to an R22 analogue. R22 is banned per the Montreal Protocol as of 2020.
However, R22 has thermodynamic properties that make it more efficient than the standard refrigerant of today's residential and small commercial units, R410A. This is particularly as the heat of the atmosphere being rejected into rises with some Coefficient Of Performance (COP) differences in the 10% range.
There are some analogues to R22 without the ozone damaging properties that share or exceed the the thermodynamic performance of R22. R407C is one that comes to mind, but there's a handful that can be retrofitted or purchased new.
However, a trade off is that generally a newer Energy Star unit will be significantly more efficient than an older R22 unit. My point with the R22 is that the industry will slowly move towards some of these other refrigerants because of their better thermodynamics.
Are you sure that isn't saw manufacturer propaganda?
I thought the issue with SawStop wasn't that the licensing was bad but that nobody was willing to take on the liability.
ie. If someone cut off their hand with a table saw, it was settled law that it was their own fault. If someone cut off their hand and the SawStop didn't fire, the manufacturer now had a gigantic liability.
SawStop is or was trying to get the government to ban the sale of saws without flesh detection technology. Guess who holds the patents for said technology?
Bosch came out with a superior design that doesn't use a brake at all, but were barred from selling it in the US because it infringed SawStop's patents.
We have a SawStop in our space for exactly that reason.
However, I don't find forcing everyone to have it by law to be particularly palatable.
I will tell you, however, that it goes off about once a month like clockwork and, as far as I can tell, it hasn't yet fired because someone was about to get injured (this is a good thing--it means our people aren't being stupid).
It's a $100-$200 hit every single time it fires. So, we have an ongoing expense of about $1500 every year for SawStop. That's a new saw every year.
If it’s happening that frequently, and it’s not due to contact with flesh, then you’re cutting material that you shouldn’t be, or you should be disabling the protection feature.
> you’re cutting material that you shouldn’t be, or you should be disabling the protection feature.
I will absolutely fight you on this tooth and nail.
1) I don't want anyone to get into the habit of turning off safety features. Ever.
2) If the material can be cut on that saw without the SawStop, it should be able to be cut with the SawStop. If it can't, the fault is with SawStop, not the user.
I'm happy to pay the extra money for the extra safety. However, I will NOT allow you to blame the user for the fact that SawStop has not uncommon failure modes.
Uhh - the manual will tell you not to cut aluminum, very wet wood etc with sawstop feature on.
If you turn off feature you are back to your regular saw - hopefully you use a stick etc in all cases because as you note replacing cartridges is expensive.
One thing I like, it'll put feature back on automatically for the next time machine gets turned on.
The user's definition of "wet wood" and SawStop's often differ quite significantly. Hope you're keeping a moisture meter nearby.
You also have to wait for the blade to come to a complete stop before touching anything or you will fire the system. This can be annoying when you have the motor turned off, retracted the blade, and start setting up your fence only to have the system fire because it wasn't quite stopped.
Was there a sticker on something that was slightly metallic? Oops.
I'm happy to have a SawStop on my saws, and I would even recommend it. However, given how often it false fires, I'm not sure I would mandate it by law.
Which does not trigger the device unless you are ALSO touching the staple or you cut with staple side down so you ground blade through staple into table.
THIS is actually a great suggestion. Have some lower speed that sawstop does not trigger below. It really does not need to trigger once its (very) slow unless you have a heavier dado blade maybe?
Or have a noncartridge saw brake on the saw, when you come off saw for more than 3 seconds put some light pressure on to slow it more quickly.
I think a fair number of false fires are from this rather than the "wet wood" worry.
So if we assume people are cutting appropriate material, your statement simplifies to "If it's happening that frequently you should disable it." And this is your argument in support of mandating it??
I think it's completely reasonable to require it but also mandate that the health insurance companies pay for it, and all cartridge replacements. It's in their best interest to prevent accidents, and the cost is miniscule compared to even a single ER visit.
Absolutely not - no where did I say that anyone should be forced to buy the saw.
I was merely pointing out that saying you would never buy a sawstop for whatever crazy reason (ie, other companies wouldn't pay them the $3-$10 or whatever) seems a bit ridiculous.
If you have a fair number of folks using the saw, have them touch materials to saw first with saw off to get a read on it or list the ones not recommended.
>> Lobbying is simply the practice of petitioning the government to adopt a given policy.
Adopting a policy is different from having them mandate what people buy.
Hey, have people buy epipens and keep one at the school for each kid with allergies. Then later we will raise our prices 1000 percent. That's not influencing policy, its fucking people all the way to the bank - with government assistance.
I've done some unpaid policy work. Defending democracy by advocating election integrity. No one is writing books about my mendacious activities.
FANG has a phalanx of former electeds and staffers paid to hustle their former colleagues. To defend their grift and dismantle civil society. Grist for an endless torrent of outrage porn.
While pendants will argue both me and FANG are "lobbying", petitioning our governments, our respective efforts hardly seem comparable.
Sawstop dropped blade below table. Bosch also dropped blade below table. So the invention was very fast acting sensing and then dropping blade. Sawstop added brake.
Sawstop ALSO did a brake. The brake made a pretty reasonable difference in terms of damage.
Plenty of youtube videos exposing this saw.
"SawStop uses a different mechanism to drop the blade, but also employs an aluminum brake. In our testing on both top and front strikes, the blade stopped with less damage to my hand than Bosch’s Reaxx."
"Bosch came out with a superior design that doesn't use a brake at all, but were barred from selling it in the US because it infringed SawStop's patents."
The design was not superior and the infringement was not based on a brake or lack of one. The infringement was because of copy of the skin contact sensing / blade drop technology as what were called underlying elements. I think the case may still be ongoing though? This one went a long while.
I never said that the infringement was related to the brake. I thought I was pretty clear that the patents were about skin-sensing technology.
And "not superior" is subjective. If the SawStop tech has enough false triggers and destroys as many blades as it apparently does based on what I've read (probably depends on material being cut), the increased cost almost certainly isn't worth it unless you're a high school shop class.
I don't think that was clear. You mentioned the Bosch system had a patent issue and immediately mentioned it didn't even use a break. While it's possible to read that as the Bosch system being superior because it lacks a break, the main topic was the patent issue, so it's more natural to read it as being related to that.
Meanwhile there wasn't even a mention of the sensing technology.
They basically tried to license it to the other saw companies.
The other companies said hell no. We have the market.
So sawstop started building their own (great) saws. They really are pretty to very high quality. The saw stop feature is also very effective.
It's so effective that if you are running a woodworking shop in a school, or ever want to let your kids use your saw, or have staff using your saw, you really owe it to them to ALWAYS buy a sawstop.
I've worked with a few owners who took the approach you did. Inevitably someone loses a finger - and after the dust settles and folks ask why they didn't put this VERY simple and not that expense solution in place - they usually regret it. Either they feel guilty for chisling on some $ and having someone lose function in their hand or if they are here in CA they pay out BIG TIME for their stupidity.
A series of meetings followed, in which Gass "negotiated with major players such as Ryobi, Delta, Black & Decker, Emerson, and Craftsman" in an attempt to license his invention; he followed those negotiations with a February 2001 presentation to the Defense Research Industry, a trade group for attorneys representing the power-tool industry.[7] That presentation immediately preceded one from Dan Lanier, Black & Decker's national coordinating counsel; Lanier's presentation gave Gass the impression he was unlikely to succeed in convincing major power tool manufacturers to license SawStop technology.[7]
The license fee was going to be around 3% of wholesale (so about $3 on a $100 wholesale saw that goes for $200 retail). I think he came very close to licensing to ryobi?
Anyways, if you think $3 for potentially incredibly QOL saving tech is too much for an inventor that actually invented something (and tested on his own finger) then I don't know what to tell you.
That said, once someone's parents (if you run a woodshop in a school) or employee sues you - you may start valuing this invention a bit more.
> On the other hand (!), maybe the onus for the lost fingers is on SawStop for demanding those licensing fees.
Done.
Do you disagree that your writing says "the onus for lost finger is on SawStop"? Your writing seems very clear to me. I do not know why you are confused.
Safety features are not free and no one should expect them to be.
If some safety feature is judged too important not to have, as it is common in cars, the government steps in and makes it mandatory, but it doesn't mean there are no more licensing fees. At best, the licensing fees are limited to a fair price.
Did anybody use Moderna's patents? As far as I know nobody did because Moderna licensed them for a limited time in which nobody would be able to ramp up a completely new production line.
Almost always those 0 cost licensing agreements are just PR stunts.
I give away tech for free that I work full time on every day. (The D programming language). So does everyone else who works on it. It's how Open Source works.
Not at all. They're free to manufacture and sell sawstop saws. They can also supply the necessary hardware to other saw makers, saving them the trouble of developing it themselves. It'd be likely cheaper to just buy the hardware than reverse-engineer it.
It's good that the license was only $3, but the end user also has to buy at least one disposable $80 cartridge (probably more, apparently false alarms happen) for a problem that can be solved with a push stick.
You can send in your activated cartridge to sawstop - if it was skin activated then they may replace it for free.
If you are concerned about a trip you can touch blade to piece with saw off and it'll tell you if would have tripped. Or do a first cut with system off. Or if you have a wet piece turn it off.
That said if you have a nail or something in piece there are situations that could trip it for sure.
I was at a shop that had a "wall of shame" with sawstop cartridges that had tripped when people tried to saw wet wood, metallized plastic, and other conductive materials.
$3 was at least 100, if not 1000 times more than these manufacturers would have ever been willing to pay in license. That was just the license, the technology itself added significant cost, weight and complexity.
It's no surprise that sawstop can make a nice saw for 4 to 17x the price of competitors.
> The other companies said hell no. We have the market.
The other manufacturers would have had to immediately stop selling and possible have pulled all the other saws off the market. For liability reasons, you can't sell a line of saws that chop off fingers next to a line that doesn't. You're basically admitting the former is defective.
What is the basis for this claim? It doesn't sound particularly plausible compared to other safety features, such as car airbags, which are not offered across all products in a brand.
I'm not convinced about that legal theory. There's another precedent in motorcycle ABS: unlike cars, not all bikes have it yet, so you can buy a Ninja both with and without ABS. The feature is even more decisively important for bikes than cars because it keeps them upright and stable under hard braking, so it's not just stopping distance. It adds several hundred to the price.
Or maybe you're right and we'll see an "admission of defect" suit sometime soon.
This is nonsense. Saws that chop off fingers aren't defective - the user is. It's a simple argument to make.
Saw Y doesn't have safety features and you use it at your own risk of injury.
Saw X will stop cutting the moment it detects a body part. You also use it at your own risk of injury.
For liability reasons, you can't sell a line of saws that chop off fingers next to a line that doesn't. You're basically admitting the former is defective.
I'd think the opposite is true - you can't sell a $250 saw that won't cut someone's finger off next to a $200 saw and expect it to sell. No one thinks it'll happen to them... otherwise Saw-stop's own line of saws would dominate the market. Some people will pay the premium, but I'd bet that most will not.
I have two dozen patents to my name and know dozens of others who hold as many or more than I do. I also know just as many successful entrepreneurs.
Not one had ever said "I would commercialize <x>, but for the patents", nor have any said "I would stop doing innovation if patents ceased to exist".
I concede that there are some field where it might make sense (eg pharmacology), but most of the time, patents are a tax -- hugely expensive for small innovators and weaponized by mega-corps.
Further, in times of crisis (eg COVID or war with radar), patents are suspended for certain topics to promote speed of execution. We are at that point for climate change & energy efficiency.
I would like to have a breakdown of individual vs. organization-backed inventors. Quite a lot of - but I don't know how much, relatively - patent applications are filled by individuals with help and in the name of their employer; there are companies who are proud of the number of patent applications they file per year - and those are mostly bona-fide inventions, not patent trolling.
(It's entirely expected, if you think about it - a big company employing skilled specialists doing actual[0] engineering is bound to become a patent mill, as those workers have to invent their way out of new problems.)
I suspect that this might be the primary way patents are applied for and awarded, and it's different from the usual narration, that patents are either small inventors wanting to ensure the market rewards them for their hard work, or evil megacorps buying them up as a part of peace-through-MAD balance with other evil megacorps.
--
[0] - Traditional, "trad", not-software engineering. I know this is just a stereotype, and this[1] series of articles does a great job debunking it, but... well, I haven't fully internalized these conclusions just yet.
Vapor compression is a technology ripe for disruption. I reckon the IP holder knows this and is trying to monetize this while they can.
I think tech based on magnetocaloric cooling is one option. There was a company I was following a years ago (I've since forgotten the name) that was researching advanced thermoelectric cooling technologies that would be offer much better performance than peltiers.
> Incumbents will resist choosing to continue with current public domain technology. In 30 years when the IP expires it might possibly come into more common use. The current IP regimes are a complete disaster and are hamstringing human progress.
I am curious. What explains the success of Microsoft Windows as the dominant "technology" for PCs and laptops? That's not due to "intellectual protection rights" is it? I am not a software engineer, just a display engineer, would I be correct if I alleged that "IP regimes" are hamstringing operating system progress? My gut instinct is no, that would be an absurd claim. Perhaps equivalent to me claiming that "IP regimes" are hamstringing search engine progress? I am genuinely interested to find out what people think about this.
Yes, IP regimes are definitely hamstringing operating system progress. https://en.swpat.org/wiki/NetApp%27s_filesystem_patents goes into some details about why Linux doesn't have automatic transparent instantaneous backups like the NetApp fileserver I was using a quarter century ago.
This technology (the idea of linear compressor directly driven by a coil) is used for at least two decades, particularly in LG compressors in AC and refrigerators [1].
Also the refrigerants matter - unfortunately, the MOST efficient ones also happen to be really bad for the ozone layer so they've been "banned" (there are still plenty of units out there using them - just can't use on new systems).
So there's always a trade-off. You pay for this or you pay for that. And if its energy, you have to consider the material and energy supply chains or you are probably bullshitting people and yourself.
Ultimately an air con is a heat engine so Carnot's law applies. No possible magic beyond what thermodynamics allows.
ALL TOO MANY "inventions" summarily . You even have UC Berkeley getting into the con-game with the Water Seer (which claims violates thermodynamics). You'd THINK UCB wouldn't ever push physics-violating ideas but NOPE. A stain on the engineering school reputation!
Isn't the video inaccurate about the force of current pumps near maximum compression?
The power put into the system by the motor is constant throughout the entire revolution. It follows that, since the piston moves slower near maximum compression, force increases (since power = force * speed). This is also intuitively the case: You need much more force to push back the piston (against a constant motor torque) near its apex because the moment arm of the crank shaft gets smaller and smaller.
Yes, at the maximum compression point the force is not well-defined. In a sense it is infinite (you could not actually turn the rotor by pushing on the piston). But certainly not zero.
I'm struggling to understand what the creator might have meant instead. It's not work or power (which, again, is constant). The rotary motion works, if anything, in favor of the system, as the force gets larger with compression (past the midway point). Is there some quantity I'm missing? Maybe something to do with gas laws?
I'm also skeptical about the illustration with the additional magnets to contain the magnetic field lines. As drawn, that would not work for AC as the magnetic field would be the wrong way around half the time. Maybe they just use extra iron to shape the field - but that is extremely far from being innovative and more like electrical engineering 101.
It could well be that I'm missing something, but overall this video had multiple strange explanations that lower my confidence in the overall accuracy of the reporting...
Do note that Magtor is currently only claiming to be able to compress air, not air conditioning fluids / refrigerants. They add that "[a]lthough air compression is a first milestone for Magtor, the medium-term goal is to bring Magtor efficiencies to climate control engineering allowing products such as fridges, heat pumps and air conditioning units to become 30+% more efficient" [1].
It's hard to verify more on the design. They offer a lot of explanation and tests, but no independent review is given. Main question on YouTube about scrolling compressors (used in newer fridges) is anwered a bit vaguely [2].
The patent portfolio page is very grandiose [3] but doesn't care to link anything. A quick search doesn't turn up much to do with air or fluid compression, only "Magnet device comprising stators and translators" [4] and similar, which don't mention compression at all.
How can something like a rapid compressor generate SO much heat AND transfer it so quickly. Isn’t there some kind of time delay in both generation and transfer?
They appear not to be developing the compressors themselves, but instead are trying to license their IP.
From their ‘Who are we’ page[1], their Director of Production “oversees the production of the Magtopressor Demonstrators”, so not really production per se.
The focus on worldwide patents and number of patents in the videos is also noticeable.
From reading some links from here, I don't think so. Despite the breathless amazement of the writers, it doesn't seem to really be an innovation in heat pumps itself, it's just doing things in a way that's much more efficient than Tesla's previous heating/cooling systems...
Most residential (and many commercial) AC units, refrigerators, heat pump and such use scroll compressors. Yes, they have a startup in rush, but I'd be interested in seeing efficiency of this tech versus current scroll compressors.
--- Post by "Just Have a Think" (the creator)
Response from Magtor CTO : There are many types of compressor in use and the industry somewhat specialises within particular technologies based on the power requirements, type of applications, manufacturing costs, end product costs, etc.
Regarding efficiency of scroll vs reciprocating compressors, not all sources agree but the trend is that scroll compressors are at least slightly more efficient, based on operating conditions…
FYI this is an advert. Not just in resemblance to an infomercial but the youtube presenter is reaching out and quoting CTO of the company as responses to youtuber questions in comments.
Sure, but it would be very unlikely in this particular case, given that YT is very trigger happy when it comes to violations and YT is the main source of his livelihood.
I regularly watch this channel and I honestly believe his claims of independence (no revenue from any kind of sponsorships or adverts, just from Patreons). I think he simply want to be helpful for his audience and forward questions/responses if he has the chance to do so.
Overall I like his content, he is usually fairly technical and realistic about the prospect of things he cover. He has also has done some deep dives in e.g how to calculate levelized cost of energy to help analyse/compare different new inovations he showcase on the channel.
But sometimes I guess it can be slightly too pop-sciencey, reminding me (both in a good and bad way) of the glossy science magazines of my youth. Extrapolating barley lab bench-viable results to full scale production, with very optimistic timelines etc.
Even if this is not an advert, he could have done better research and put a more balanced view. Are there prior work similar to this? What are the risks for the companies approach? Will it really provide 30% better efficiency? In current form this indeed looks like an advert, whether intentional or not.
Years ago, I did try to built on similar concept but instead using reluctance for further reducing hysteresis losses. Due to lower power density of such system the size of the compressor was increased by about 2 times.
How did this get a patent? This is just an linear piston pump [1][2].
You can literally buy fish tank air pumps that use this exact mechanism [3].
The only thing mildly novel here is that they're driving it both directions via magnets & more complex drive electronics. Most of the commercial versions just use a steel piston, and single-direction actuation because they can then run the electromagnet directly off mains AC to get the cycling action.
LG been making linear piston compressors for mass market for more than a decade.
The true breakthrough here will happen with solid state gas compressors.
Solid state compressors already approach, or pass 50% efficiency — something only possible in very large, staged, centrifugal compressors for large AC systems. A solid state compressor, unlike that, will be equally efficient regardless the size.
224 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadFor air conditioning, fridges, ground source heat pumps.
https://www.magtor.tech/
Even if it works I'm not going to buy a new fridge just for that though. Manufacturing a whole new fridge will be worse for the environment than running this for many years especially on green power.
However when it does go, it would be nice to have.
The video is discussing a new technology from a company which purports to have come up with a more efficient way of compressing refrigerant in cooling systems, https://www.magtor.tech
The submission lacks '[video]' and took me a couple of seconds to decide it wasn't for me, just in terms of presentation style even after you made it more appealing.
It gets pulled out as a factoid periodically.
There is a large scientific community all publishing well researched videos. It's a free platform that has a large audience, seems like a natural fit for anyone looking to teach.
https://www.youtube.com/c/TheAIEpiphany
https://www.youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime
https://www.youtube.com/c/SciShow
As some examples
I believe HN is quite efficient, in that I expect to see AC 33% efficiency boost in paper/startup/PR/etc. form. Then maybe the 'how it works' or explainer videos later, sure, but you can't claim 'revolutionary' at that point.
Someone else pointed out it is new, it's just that for some reason the submittor chose the video instead of the company site announcing it which includes the video.
> Most modern compressors and pumps use rotary motors to shove a fluid from A to B inside a chamber, but rotary motors can lose as much as 30 percent of their output when they're asked to convert their rotary motion into linear motion required by compressors and pumps. That conversion is done by a crankshaft and once a crankshaft is in the system you get some friction losses but more importantly you get diminished efficiency because you're only getting maximum shove force in the middle of the piston stroke. The start and end of the stroke are both dead points where zero force is available to do any useful work. In a compression task you really want the maximum force to be applied at the end of the stroke not the minimum force. Overcoming these inertia forces every time the motor starts up requires a big spike in power demand which can be as much as five times the motor's normal operating consumption.
> The technology that Magtor have been quietly developing for over a decade now is a magnetically driven linear motor that completely eliminates the need for a crankshaft and achieves far higher operating efficiency as a result. Here's how it works. A fixed electromagnet stator sits at the centre of the motor. On either side of that are magnetic plates that are connected to each other via a shaft that runs through the middle of the stator. That connection effectively turns the two magnetic plates into a single moving part. As a voltage is applied across the electromagnet its polarity attracts the magnetic plate at one end and repels the magnetic plate at the other end. But because it's an electromagnet its polarity is changing 50 or 60 times a second as a result of the alternating current flowing through the copper windings. [...]
> You also avoid that costly power spike at start up as well. Because there's negligible mechanical inertia to overcome, as soon as an electrical current is applied the movement caused by magnetic attraction and repulsion can get going instantaneously. And on top of all that, Magtor have developed a very smart additional element that optimizes the motive power provided by the magnetic flux of the system. [...] In this working example a magtopressor is connected to a five-litre tank of air. Magtor's tests have shown that their device, which is smaller and lighter than a traditional reciprocating piston air compressor, can pressurize a cylinder 38% faster while consuming 33% percent less electricity.
(emphasis added)
They run in a continuous way rather than with a piston. And my understanding is that most A/C compressors use them.
I don't think that's right. Why would diminished force when the piston is turning around lead to a power loss?
At best, this wastes power. At worst, this wastes power and means the one room you actually want to cool doesn't get cooled properly.
I've lived in a unit with a door in the same room as a split system and it was amazing. The room would become completely cool in around 5 minutes, then the compressor would shut off and run for maybe 2 minutes every 15 minutes or so to maintain this cool temperature.
Definitely sounds regional, but also we air condition the entire house so we aren't winning the efficiency war here.
Central HVAC exists, but 90%+ homes don't have them.
It's not as convenient and comfortable (one common problem older houses have is that there is no AC in kitchen) but the energy cost difference compared to the norm in the North America is night and day (the houses are significantly smaller here too).
In Australia you can get ducted systems, but at the residential scale it's both more expensive and less efficient than split systems. So houses will often have larger split units (5 - 10kW heat/cool capacity) in the main living areas and then smaller ones (2.5 - 3.5kW capacity) in all the bedrooms. Sometimes you have a multi-head system with one outdoor compressor unit and two or three indoor units.
This is even the case for large apartment buildings (often have a separate AC compressor for each unit), but most office and commercial buildings have central AC.
I've spent some time trying to turn a portable AC unit into proper AC solution during the recent heatwaves over here in Poland, and the doors were a problem for me, not a solution. For example, I work in a study, and my wife continuously moves back and forth between kitchen and the living room. That's already 3 rooms to cool, 4 if you count the corridor (which shouldn't cause you a thermal shock every time you navigate it). Which doors are best closed or open depends on whether our kid is home. E.g. when she is at home, my study doors are closed, and I get to cook inside.
I'm on a rental now, so I can't duct the apartment the way I'd like (also the reason I bought a portable unit), but on the next apartment, I plan to either have a split system with a terminal in every room, or a duct system for supply air from the AC unit.
I understand that for large homes, some rooms may not see much use during the day - but in apartments, I can't imagine such a thing, unless you're living alone.
The design described does seem to have fewer moving parts, which is good. But the advantage of linear vs rotary motion with respect to forces seems sketchy. Field strength in the linear system is likely to vary across the travel and would still need to be synchronized to the alternating current to prevent motor stalls. (Edit 50 of this comment: this effect is actually illustrated directly in the video here: https://youtu.be/2TFiL5BM3ss?t=348 Imagine the field lines directly correlate with force applied, and mentally plot the quantity of field lines over time as you watch the animation. Turns out it looks precisely like the force chart of a rotary compressor.)
The primary advantage of this pump, to me, seems to be reduced weight/complexity and lower friction losses. For it to operate with low starting load it would likely need to essentially vibrate its way to full travel (confirmed at 7:47 in the video), something rotary compressors can’t really do. If you try to restart rotary compressors too quickly after stopping, the high head pressure will stall the motor. This causes it to effectively be a dead short minus winding resistance, pulling much more current than average (known as LRA or locked rotor amps) with no cooling. This will heat the motor quickly until it thermally trips or burns up. This is why you will frequently see restart delays in A/C systems.
For what its worth, scroll compressors have been around forever and share some of these advantages, but aren’t dominant in the industry because of the additional complexity in manufacturing. They have an additional advantage of somewhat continous output pressure, which *significantly* reduces ambient noise and vibration. They also have fewer moving parts and are generally more reliable.
All of these advantages convey to standard air compressors by the way, something I'm a little surprised they didn't mention.
https://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=...
I assume that this is pretty common in trying to improve linear motors - I am trying to get my hands on a small one to drive an air pump and it's just inscrutable to me.
I love the idea of low hanging fruit in every dimension of technology, but the reality is that linear pumps have been around for quite some time and aren't dominant in any high (sales) volume application that I'm familiar with. That tells me there are likely some tradeoffs here that are not being explained. Vibration would be one obvious area, but could be handled with a harmonic balancer or an additional pump operating 180 out of phase (unfortunately increasing cost/complexity).
The other potential issue is that the motor needs to be built for the application for the most part. With rotary compressors, you can incorporate pulleys to gear the system up or down in accordance with the cheapest motor you can put to use. With this system the motor is the pump, so it's harder to add some kind of lever to gear it up or down. (This is less applicable to small A/C systems which tend to use hermetically sealed compressor systems, but for larger systems this can come into play.)
Now Copeland may choose to build these, but they are going to have to build the motor vs. buying them from one of hundreds of companies that build AC motors to spec.
Now one of those companies might decide to build these linear motors, but they are going to have to license the IP to do so, putting them at a distinct cost disadvantage vs. standard rotary motors. They are also going to be a sole supplier for some time, something manufacturers are very wary of unless it's a major differentiator. These are likely to cancel out.
As you say, they are vertically integrated, they are well set up to produce the full stack of the technology. They also need compressors (for air conditioning, and at least in their trucks for other systems), that need to be compact and energy efficient. The technologies at play (pressurized fluids, eletric motors and magnets) are all very familiar to them.
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/08/03/teslas-octovalve-enable...
> In the Tesla Model Y, the heat pump was a true engineering marvel. Elon admitted on the podcast that he has a trophy rack of impressive tech his teams have come up with in his bedroom at home. The new printed circuit board (PCB) for the Tesla Octovalve was so impressive to Elon that he added it to his bedroom trophy rack.
It's probably pretty easy to swap out the compressor for a new design, fundamentally all compressors do the same thing.
Every house in Japan with a small scale septic system has a linear pump for injecting air. This may sound niche but in fact large parts of the tokyo metro area are not on centralized sewer systems. Thus there should be at least 10M+ houses with such motors running continuously in Japan alone.
The pumps run 24/7 without maintenance for well over a decade.
Which also suggests there are bigger reasons not to use such pumps in AC. As any Japanese manufacturer will know of such pumps.
Yup! This reminds me of a similar pitch from a few years ago. When a Kickstarter went live for a small, quiet window air unit called Noria, people signed up in droves, thinking a startup in Philadelphia had somehow solved a physics problem that Johnson Controls and the companies it's sucked up over the years somehow whiffed on. This new device would chill the whole room, it would be quiet, compact, and most importantly, it wouldn't be heavy. It would easily slot into your window, and store under your bed in the cooler months when you don't need it. They raised nearly $1.5M USD in 2016, and in the last year finally started to deliver window units that were ... big, heavy, and noisy.
The physics of heat exchangers are very well established. It's wise to take any wild claims of higher efficiency with a massive grain of salt - someone missed something in their equations and it's going to come out during manufacturing.
It was amazing to me how small the screws were for say, a shopping mall unit.. and how PRECISE the machining was.
The math behind the profiles was insane to, it was a 'self generating' curve.. You calculated a point on the curve, and that was fed in to generate the next point. Generating a new profile shape was a HUGE process... Wonder what it would be like with today's computers :-P
You could then move the table anywhere you wanted in X/Y, cover the display, and he would bring it back to 0.0000X by eye :-)
He actually went to some institute in Sweden that did ultra-accurate measurements to show them how he did it. I think the 'trick' was, he moved the shadow till it was just past the blueprint, and back it off till a sliver of light shone thru, rather then trying to 'walk' the shadow up to the blueprint..
Neat stuff - but I decided on a tech career when I was mucking out the Holyroyd mill and he turned the cutting pumps on :-P Being drenched in cutting oil convinced me I liked computers better :-P
(Superchargers are simpler, but cost ~10% engine power to drive)
Inverter based heat pumps and ACs that are already available on the market today have low LRAs as a consequence of their ability to operate at continuously variable speeds.
[1] http://magtor.com/
https://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=...
Using the inertia of the plate mass at the end of each stroke is clever though.
I'd have thought a rotary electric motor connected to a rotary compressor would be quieter and easier to design the bearings for, and would operate in a more steady-state regime, so be more reliable. You also don't need the valve where the fluid from the two sides meets up, avoiding that efficiency loss.
I think the latest fridges (which are also air conditioners) use rotary compression.
Modern fridges and industrial electric motors have had "soft start" circuits in them for at least a decade. The start-up current thing is a non-issue.
I didn't quite understood how that new design is more reliable or serviceable? The closed compressors are literally zero maintenance. Also, the vibrations of that thing will tear itself apart quite fast, just look at their own promotional video: the pipes themselves cannot possibly last long with such vibrations: https://youtu.be/2TFiL5BM3ss?t=471
PS: Also scroll compressors are substantially more energy efficient than rotary and various means of staging is even more efficient yet.
Have they said this is their strategy?
There are IP licensors (like ARM and the Fraunhofer Society) that sell licences to their IP without trying to force jurisdictions to adopt their technology.
> Incumbents will resist choosing to continue with current public domain technology
This would depend on the pricing of the IP licences and the competition within the market. If the licences are cheap enough and the market competitive enough that using this tech would provide an advantage, then incumbents would license it.
A lot of IP boils down to an idea that you could describe in an elevator and a few good engineers could turn into a product in a few hours to a year.
ARM sells things that represent... thousands? hundreds of thousands? of engineer-years. You can't just whip that up in a short time, it totally makes sense to pay someone else for their trouble to make something... but if you wanted to and had a billion dollars to spare, sure you could do it yourself.
The problem with "I thought of it first" IP protections is the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery. A whole lot of ideas just have their time come, and tend to have multiple people working on them and coming to similar results in short periods. Making this a race and letting the winner sell out to groups that either want to extract rent out of the idea or to hide it in a safe to prevent competition for 30 years is not conducive to progress.
One was a method of texting that didn't require looking at the phone, the other was a way to display lo-res graphics data without pixelation.
Oh that's easy, every phone before iPhone could do it - you need a) a physical keyboard, and b) a soft real-time OS. Tactile feedback of physical buttons + stable UI configuration with learnable delays = you could learn to operate the phone without taking it out of your pocket.
:)
Joking aside, what was your invention? Could you link to the patent?
Patent 7812993 Lossy method for compressing images and video
Patent 7711748 Method and apparatus for simplified access to online services
Patent 7028033 Method and apparatus for simplified access to online services
Patent 6897977 Lossy method for compressing pictures and video
Patent 6850782 Wireless device with vibrational communication capabilities
Patent 6657647 Controlling the order in which content is displayed in a browser
Patent 6418323 Wireless mobile phone with Morse code and related capabilities
AFAIK, none of these have been made use of. Though every time I see banding and blockiness in video, I think "they should implement triangles!"
At the risk of forever poisoning myself for related work, I guess. Whose bright idea was with that "you look at it, and you and everyone you know is now liable for 3x more damages for accidental infringement" law?...
Mine, obviously. All my ideas are Bright ideas.
The patents may have expired, anyway. One of the reasons I did the patents was I was always pestering people with those ideas, as I wanted someone to implement them. So they said "patent them, which will get the ideas out there."
The graphics one was pretty straight forward. Instead of dividing up the picture into rectangles, divide it up into triangles. Set a color for each triangle based on an average of the color pixels in it. Then, smoothly shade the rendering of the triangle based on the colors at each vertex. This will prevent any banding or that ugly blockiness. The number and placement of the vertices depends on the where the complexity in the image is, and of course would be adjustable.
The browser one is to have the browser rendering prioritize where the mouse cursor is. Great for slow connections.
I can imagine this working. Kind of like CW for HAMs, except with a 3-state switch and couple dozen more layers of abstraction between you and the wire :). I wish my Morse code wasn't so rusty though - and it makes me wonder, are there better text encodings that could be used for such purpose?
The method for texting without looking I described was only limited to writing, but it's also something I've done in practice before smartphones, in particular on a Sony Ericsson K800i. This was possible because of good-quality keyboard (and joystick), and good UI decisions. I don't know if they put an actual soft-realtime OS in there (I suspect so), but all the UI delays were always the same - so I naturally memorized sequences like "unlock, menu, texting, wait ~0.5 second for it to load, open thread, type in message, send". It probably takes teenage-level or business-professional-level of use to get that kind of muscle memory, though.
> Instead of dividing up the picture into rectangles, divide it up into triangles. (...) This will prevent any banding or that ugly blockiness.
Is the insight here that a triangle-based subdivision like this will make areas of detail not align on horizontal/vertical lines, unless the underlying image has its details aligned on a band? Or am I misunderstanding this?
> the insight
The vertices will be on pixel addresses. The edges of the triangle will have no discontinuities themselves, and the triangles sharing an edge will have no discontinuities. Hence, no banding or blockiness. A naive renderer would just render the colors of the triangle as a straight linear interpolation. A more advanced one could look at the adjoining triangles, and render it so the first derivative would also be zero across the line. I.e. curve fit it.
The selection of where the vertices go would likely be best selected where the colors are shifting fastest, i.e. an edge in the picture.
The neato thing is one could render a low res image on a high res display and it'll still look good. You wouldn't have these stray pixels scattered around the text like jpg does. The other neato thing is more vertices can be put in the complex areas of the image, rather than wasting bandwidth on the parts of it that are smooth.
Progressive sharpening of the rendering also works, as more vertices can be added at any time.
I have a faint suspicion that your familiarity with finite element models had something to do with your choice of triangles.
I've done finite element models, but they were pretty unsophisticated.
I was alluding the fact that barring boundary effects hexagonal tessellation and equilateral tessellation are essentially the same.
Wow, this threw me back. :) Indeed this was not only possible, but actually easy. I don't think it took a lot of effort or any conscious effort even, actually, the UI was so good, but most importantly there were no unpredictable delays and no unpredictable inconsistencies!
Why is modern software so bad in comparison? Sure it can do more things, but it does them worse. The interface of everything is constantly changing for the unfounded whims of designers who simply think "this looks prettier to me", things are not laid out logically, adverts permeate the interface of most products from phones to TVs...
PPS: Also the efficiency of a heat exchanger cycle has very little to do with the individual losses of the compressor components. Engine losses matter at the compression ratios you see in a combustion piston, but at the scale coolants run at (especially ones like in an AC that involve a phase change) it's almost noise when compared with the fundamental thermodynamic limitations. You can do a little better for sure; 33% lower friction losses seems reasonable.
But you can't do much better: the linked article is surely not talking about 33% better overall cooling efficiency, that sounds insane to me.
One bit of reasonable efficiency gains to be had is by switching refrigerants to an R22 analogue. R22 is banned per the Montreal Protocol as of 2020.
However, R22 has thermodynamic properties that make it more efficient than the standard refrigerant of today's residential and small commercial units, R410A. This is particularly as the heat of the atmosphere being rejected into rises with some Coefficient Of Performance (COP) differences in the 10% range.
https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=86088...
There are some analogues to R22 without the ozone damaging properties that share or exceed the the thermodynamic performance of R22. R407C is one that comes to mind, but there's a handful that can be retrofitted or purchased new.
However, a trade off is that generally a newer Energy Star unit will be significantly more efficient than an older R22 unit. My point with the R22 is that the industry will slowly move towards some of these other refrigerants because of their better thermodynamics.
I thought the issue with SawStop wasn't that the licensing was bad but that nobody was willing to take on the liability.
ie. If someone cut off their hand with a table saw, it was settled law that it was their own fault. If someone cut off their hand and the SawStop didn't fire, the manufacturer now had a gigantic liability.
Bosch came out with a superior design that doesn't use a brake at all, but were barred from selling it in the US because it infringed SawStop's patents.
Yeah, that's bad. When you resort to lobbying, you're no longer on the good side of the ledger.
https://www.swnewsmedia.com/shakopee_valley_news/news/educat...
However, I don't find forcing everyone to have it by law to be particularly palatable.
I will tell you, however, that it goes off about once a month like clockwork and, as far as I can tell, it hasn't yet fired because someone was about to get injured (this is a good thing--it means our people aren't being stupid).
It's a $100-$200 hit every single time it fires. So, we have an ongoing expense of about $1500 every year for SawStop. That's a new saw every year.
Should that really be forced on people?
I will absolutely fight you on this tooth and nail.
1) I don't want anyone to get into the habit of turning off safety features. Ever.
2) If the material can be cut on that saw without the SawStop, it should be able to be cut with the SawStop. If it can't, the fault is with SawStop, not the user.
I'm happy to pay the extra money for the extra safety. However, I will NOT allow you to blame the user for the fact that SawStop has not uncommon failure modes.
If you turn off feature you are back to your regular saw - hopefully you use a stick etc in all cases because as you note replacing cartridges is expensive.
One thing I like, it'll put feature back on automatically for the next time machine gets turned on.
You also have to wait for the blade to come to a complete stop before touching anything or you will fire the system. This can be annoying when you have the motor turned off, retracted the blade, and start setting up your fence only to have the system fire because it wasn't quite stopped.
Was there a sticker on something that was slightly metallic? Oops.
I'm happy to have a SawStop on my saws, and I would even recommend it. However, given how often it false fires, I'm not sure I would mandate it by law.
Or have a noncartridge saw brake on the saw, when you come off saw for more than 3 seconds put some light pressure on to slow it more quickly.
I think a fair number of false fires are from this rather than the "wet wood" worry.
$18K for a bottle of milk for a baby etc (trauma activation fees are crazy).
I was merely pointing out that saying you would never buy a sawstop for whatever crazy reason (ie, other companies wouldn't pay them the $3-$10 or whatever) seems a bit ridiculous.
If you have a fair number of folks using the saw, have them touch materials to saw first with saw off to get a read on it or list the ones not recommended.
That's a foundation of democracy, really: the right to petition the government. I think you might want to re-examine your view a bit.
Adopting a policy is different from having them mandate what people buy.
Hey, have people buy epipens and keep one at the school for each kid with allergies. Then later we will raise our prices 1000 percent. That's not influencing policy, its fucking people all the way to the bank - with government assistance.
FANG has a phalanx of former electeds and staffers paid to hustle their former colleagues. To defend their grift and dismantle civil society. Grist for an endless torrent of outrage porn.
While pendants will argue both me and FANG are "lobbying", petitioning our governments, our respective efforts hardly seem comparable.
Sawstop dropped blade below table. Bosch also dropped blade below table. So the invention was very fast acting sensing and then dropping blade. Sawstop added brake.
Sawstop ALSO did a brake. The brake made a pretty reasonable difference in terms of damage.
Plenty of youtube videos exposing this saw.
"SawStop uses a different mechanism to drop the blade, but also employs an aluminum brake. In our testing on both top and front strikes, the blade stopped with less damage to my hand than Bosch’s Reaxx."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3JsUGwt_Mg
The design was not superior and the infringement was not based on a brake or lack of one. The infringement was because of copy of the skin contact sensing / blade drop technology as what were called underlying elements. I think the case may still be ongoing though? This one went a long while.
And "not superior" is subjective. If the SawStop tech has enough false triggers and destroys as many blades as it apparently does based on what I've read (probably depends on material being cut), the increased cost almost certainly isn't worth it unless you're a high school shop class.
Meanwhile there wasn't even a mention of the sensing technology.
They basically tried to license it to the other saw companies.
The other companies said hell no. We have the market.
So sawstop started building their own (great) saws. They really are pretty to very high quality. The saw stop feature is also very effective.
It's so effective that if you are running a woodworking shop in a school, or ever want to let your kids use your saw, or have staff using your saw, you really owe it to them to ALWAYS buy a sawstop.
I've worked with a few owners who took the approach you did. Inevitably someone loses a finger - and after the dust settles and folks ask why they didn't put this VERY simple and not that expense solution in place - they usually regret it. Either they feel guilty for chisling on some $ and having someone lose function in their hand or if they are here in CA they pay out BIG TIME for their stupidity.
The license fee was going to be around 3% of wholesale (so about $3 on a $100 wholesale saw that goes for $200 retail). I think he came very close to licensing to ryobi?
Anyways, if you think $3 for potentially incredibly QOL saving tech is too much for an inventor that actually invented something (and tested on his own finger) then I don't know what to tell you.
That said, once someone's parents (if you run a woodshop in a school) or employee sues you - you may start valuing this invention a bit more.
The poster wanted to punish inventors for inventing. If that isn't a perverse incentive I don't know what is.
Please try reading what I wrote again.
Done.
Do you disagree that your writing says "the onus for lost finger is on SawStop"? Your writing seems very clear to me. I do not know why you are confused.
If some safety feature is judged too important not to have, as it is common in cars, the government steps in and makes it mandatory, but it doesn't mean there are no more licensing fees. At best, the licensing fees are limited to a fair price.
There's a difference between the cost to provide something and the license fee. Note the Moderna licensed its covid patents for $0.
> a fair price
What's a fair price? What is the rule that says one party is greedy and the other is reasonable?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat...
Almost always those 0 cost licensing agreements are just PR stunts.
> On the other hand (!), maybe the onus for the lost fingers is on SawStop for demanding those licensing fees.
Also Walter:
> What's a fair price? What is the rule that says one party is greedy and the other is reasonable?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/douglasbell/2019/08/13/60-years...
Sometimes companies and individuals think that it's wroth losing financially for the sake of wider safety.
Are you seriously suggesting that they should just work for free?
You can send in your activated cartridge to sawstop - if it was skin activated then they may replace it for free.
If you are concerned about a trip you can touch blade to piece with saw off and it'll tell you if would have tripped. Or do a first cut with system off. Or if you have a wet piece turn it off.
That said if you have a nail or something in piece there are situations that could trip it for sure.
It's no surprise that sawstop can make a nice saw for 4 to 17x the price of competitors.
The other manufacturers would have had to immediately stop selling and possible have pulled all the other saws off the market. For liability reasons, you can't sell a line of saws that chop off fingers next to a line that doesn't. You're basically admitting the former is defective.
Or maybe you're right and we'll see an "admission of defect" suit sometime soon.
Saw Y doesn't have safety features and you use it at your own risk of injury. Saw X will stop cutting the moment it detects a body part. You also use it at your own risk of injury.
I'd think the opposite is true - you can't sell a $250 saw that won't cut someone's finger off next to a $200 saw and expect it to sell. No one thinks it'll happen to them... otherwise Saw-stop's own line of saws would dominate the market. Some people will pay the premium, but I'd bet that most will not.
Not one had ever said "I would commercialize <x>, but for the patents", nor have any said "I would stop doing innovation if patents ceased to exist".
I concede that there are some field where it might make sense (eg pharmacology), but most of the time, patents are a tax -- hugely expensive for small innovators and weaponized by mega-corps.
Further, in times of crisis (eg COVID or war with radar), patents are suspended for certain topics to promote speed of execution. We are at that point for climate change & energy efficiency.
I would love to see patent fees based on income level, and the more you get; the more they cost.
(It's entirely expected, if you think about it - a big company employing skilled specialists doing actual[0] engineering is bound to become a patent mill, as those workers have to invent their way out of new problems.)
I suspect that this might be the primary way patents are applied for and awarded, and it's different from the usual narration, that patents are either small inventors wanting to ensure the market rewards them for their hard work, or evil megacorps buying them up as a part of peace-through-MAD balance with other evil megacorps.
--
[0] - Traditional, "trad", not-software engineering. I know this is just a stereotype, and this[1] series of articles does a great job debunking it, but... well, I haven't fully internalized these conclusions just yet.
[1] - https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/; thanks 'Twisol for bringing it up (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28192650).
I would think most of this stuff would have prior art...
I think tech based on magnetocaloric cooling is one option. There was a company I was following a years ago (I've since forgotten the name) that was researching advanced thermoelectric cooling technologies that would be offer much better performance than peltiers.
I am curious. What explains the success of Microsoft Windows as the dominant "technology" for PCs and laptops? That's not due to "intellectual protection rights" is it? I am not a software engineer, just a display engineer, would I be correct if I alleged that "IP regimes" are hamstringing operating system progress? My gut instinct is no, that would be an absurd claim. Perhaps equivalent to me claiming that "IP regimes" are hamstringing search engine progress? I am genuinely interested to find out what people think about this.
Yes, IP regimes are definitely hamstringing operating system progress. https://en.swpat.org/wiki/NetApp%27s_filesystem_patents goes into some details about why Linux doesn't have automatic transparent instantaneous backups like the NetApp fileserver I was using a quarter century ago.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_compressor
The company probably doesn't want to sit on their IP for 30 years and not yield any profit. How does that benefit them.
They'll try to bend some arms, and if this fails, they're most likely to drop licensing prices until they meet market demand.
And yes, there's demand for efficient AC. I mean, come on.
So there's always a trade-off. You pay for this or you pay for that. And if its energy, you have to consider the material and energy supply chains or you are probably bullshitting people and yourself.
Ultimately an air con is a heat engine so Carnot's law applies. No possible magic beyond what thermodynamics allows.
ALL TOO MANY "inventions" summarily . You even have UC Berkeley getting into the con-game with the Water Seer (which claims violates thermodynamics). You'd THINK UCB wouldn't ever push physics-violating ideas but NOPE. A stain on the engineering school reputation!
The power put into the system by the motor is constant throughout the entire revolution. It follows that, since the piston moves slower near maximum compression, force increases (since power = force * speed). This is also intuitively the case: You need much more force to push back the piston (against a constant motor torque) near its apex because the moment arm of the crank shaft gets smaller and smaller.
Yes, at the maximum compression point the force is not well-defined. In a sense it is infinite (you could not actually turn the rotor by pushing on the piston). But certainly not zero.
I'm struggling to understand what the creator might have meant instead. It's not work or power (which, again, is constant). The rotary motion works, if anything, in favor of the system, as the force gets larger with compression (past the midway point). Is there some quantity I'm missing? Maybe something to do with gas laws?
I'm also skeptical about the illustration with the additional magnets to contain the magnetic field lines. As drawn, that would not work for AC as the magnetic field would be the wrong way around half the time. Maybe they just use extra iron to shape the field - but that is extremely far from being innovative and more like electrical engineering 101.
It could well be that I'm missing something, but overall this video had multiple strange explanations that lower my confidence in the overall accuracy of the reporting...
It's hard to verify more on the design. They offer a lot of explanation and tests, but no independent review is given. Main question on YouTube about scrolling compressors (used in newer fridges) is anwered a bit vaguely [2].
The patent portfolio page is very grandiose [3] but doesn't care to link anything. A quick search doesn't turn up much to do with air or fluid compression, only "Magnet device comprising stators and translators" [4] and similar, which don't mention compression at all.
[1] https://www.magtor.tech/who-we-are/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TFiL5BM3ss&lc=UgxHEJkjlZ9fZ...
[3] https://www.magtor.tech/intellectual-property/
[4] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10943721B2
From their ‘Who are we’ page[1], their Director of Production “oversees the production of the Magtopressor Demonstrators”, so not really production per se.
The focus on worldwide patents and number of patents in the videos is also noticeable.
[1] https://www.magtor.tech/who-we-are/#our-key-personnel
https://www.pickhvac.com/faq/what-is-the-best-seer/
Attempt at direct linking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TFiL5BM3ss&lc=UgzdQZ_jgrbde...
--- Context (post by Ed Williams)
Most residential (and many commercial) AC units, refrigerators, heat pump and such use scroll compressors. Yes, they have a startup in rush, but I'd be interested in seeing efficiency of this tech versus current scroll compressors.
--- Post by "Just Have a Think" (the creator)
Response from Magtor CTO : There are many types of compressor in use and the industry somewhat specialises within particular technologies based on the power requirements, type of applications, manufacturing costs, end product costs, etc.
Regarding efficiency of scroll vs reciprocating compressors, not all sources agree but the trend is that scroll compressors are at least slightly more efficient, based on operating conditions…
There is this interesting white paper from Schneider Electric, “The different types of cooling compressors” https://download.schneider-electric.com/files?p_Doc_Ref=SPD_... and I also found this study: “Comparison of hermetic scroll and reciprocating compressors operating under varying refrigerant charge and load” at https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=http...
Overall I like his content, he is usually fairly technical and realistic about the prospect of things he cover. He has also has done some deep dives in e.g how to calculate levelized cost of energy to help analyse/compare different new inovations he showcase on the channel.
But sometimes I guess it can be slightly too pop-sciencey, reminding me (both in a good and bad way) of the glossy science magazines of my youth. Extrapolating barley lab bench-viable results to full scale production, with very optimistic timelines etc.
Google "Sawafuji Swing Compressor".
if you buy a airconditiiner that only cools (or only heats) it can be aything from 3 to 5 times more efficient than a reverse cycle type.
You can literally buy fish tank air pumps that use this exact mechanism [3].
The only thing mildly novel here is that they're driving it both directions via magnets & more complex drive electronics. Most of the commercial versions just use a steel piston, and single-direction actuation because they can then run the electromagnet directly off mains AC to get the cycling action.
1: https://www.techmagpm.com/en/linear-piston/ 2: https://www.nitto-kohki.eu/en/operating-principles-en/linear... 3: https://www.jehmco.com/html/central_air_pumps.html
The true breakthrough here will happen with solid state gas compressors.
Solid state compressors already approach, or pass 50% efficiency — something only possible in very large, staged, centrifugal compressors for large AC systems. A solid state compressor, unlike that, will be equally efficient regardless the size.