When the experimental results came back, they puzzled Adam Slavney and Jinyoung Seo. They had been testing a new class of materials for more efficient refrigerators, air conditioners, and heat pumps, a mission that the cooling appliance industry has been on for eons. The measurements for the materials that the team was testing shouldn’t have been different, but they were.
What did we change?” Slavney told TechCrunch. The company recently raised $8.5 million in a follow-on to its seed round, co-led by Sazze Partners and LB Investment with participation from KDB Silicon Valley, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. A refrigerator or heat pump using Pascal’s material promises to be around 20% more efficient than existing models, he said. (Both heat pumps and refrigerators use the same basic technology.) The startup has signed a contract with a multinational beverage company for a pilot of the technology.
Pascal is on track to deliver its first prototype early next year, and it hopes to follow that with a batch of more polished refrigerators in 2028. Scientists have been searching for better refrigerants for almost as long as refrigerators have existed. More recently, they’ve been looking for compounds that don’t harm the atmosphere in one way or another.
They exist, but they also need to be at least as effective as existing refrigerants. Older gaseous refrigerants like Freon ate a hole in the ozone layer, while newer ones like R-134a are still extremely potent greenhouse gases. One alternative that has attracted researchers’ attention is a class of materials known as solid-state refrigerants.
Because they’re solid, they can’t escape to the atmosphere, eliminating the climate and ozone concerns that haunt modern refrigerants. Solid-state refrigerants promise to make refrigerators and heat pumps more efficient. They work similarly to traditional refrigerants, giving off heat when squeezed and absorb it when that pressure is released.
Before his serendipitous discovery, Slavney and his colleagues at Harvard University had been researching the materials. So we used the gas and then we swapped to a different gas and we were like, why are these different?” Slavney said. After numerous additional experiments, the team realized they had discovered another path toward solid-state refrigeration.
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