Barocal can chill your food and drink by squeezing a large piece of plastic crystal

Today’s refrigerators operate on the same basic technology as they did more than 100 years ago. You’d think we could have come up with something better by now.

We did, but nothing could beat cheap, reliable steam pressure—the process that keeps milk cold today. One startup is hoping to change that.

Barocal has developed a completely new method of heating and cooling using an inexpensive solid material. Prototypes are already as efficient as current refrigerator compressors, and the technology promises to use much less energy. Oh, and there’s no risk of greenhouse gases escaping, which is something that plagues vapor pressure.

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

Barocal’s core technology stems from research conducted by Xavier Moya, the startup’s founder. “I’ve always been very interested in heating and cooling technologies,” he told TechCrunch. It dates back to his youth in Spain, where he would spend hours studying in a small, hot room. “I really remember when the air conditioning came into the house – it was amazing!” He remembers.

As professor of materials physics at the University of Cambridge, he focused on coolants of all kinds, although he became particularly fascinated by solid materials that can capture and release heat simply by squeezing and stretching them. In one of his favorite shows, he asks people to take a deflated balloon, hold it to their lips, and repeatedly stretch and relax it.

“If you stretch it, it gets hot. Then if you wait, when you let go, it gets cold,” he said.

This same principle applies to the class of materials developed by Parocal, which relates to an organic material widely used in a range of industries, from plastics to paints. Normally, the molecules inside a substance rotate freely. But when they are compressed, the molecules stop rotating. Since heat, at its simplest level, is the movement of atoms and molecules, reducing this movement causes the substance to release heat. Removing the pressure allows the material to absorb heat.

Barocal uses these materials to transfer heat. In a refrigerator, for example, the material pumps heat from inside the refrigerator to the outside, lowering the temperature of the food inside. To transfer heat, the company flows water through the material and then into the cooler.

Since the material is solid, gas leakage is not a problem. In conventional refrigerators, gaseous refrigerants either decompose ozone later or heat the climate, depending on the type. Greenhouse gas-based refrigerants have become a particular concern because they can warm the climate more than 1,000 times more than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.

Although Barocal’s technology can work at any scale, the company is considering large HVAC systems and refrigerators first, systems where the startup’s efficiency gains will make a noticeable impact on the customer’s bottom line. “We are looking at larger commercial systems where I think we can make a bigger impact faster,” Moya said.