a revolutionary thermoacoustic machine developed by a team of researchers

It blows hot and cold. Air conditioner or heat pump, one is sold every minute in France. But these machines, which consume three times less energy than an electric heater, have a drawback: the gas they contain causes 10% of the greenhouse effect. A team of researchers has therefore just developed a revolutionary heat pump, which could be the solution.

This is a phenomenon well known to glassblowers: when you heat a tube, it creates music. And the phenomenon also works in reverse. When you emit a sound, the gases in the air expand and compress, this creates hot and cold, and it is exactly this principle that is applied in the thermoacoustic machine, developed after nearly 20 years of hard work by a team of scientists and engineers. To make it work, they chose a gas without any greenhouse effect, helium. The small thermoacoustic team sees a big future: the number of air conditioners sold by 2050 should be multiplied by three.