Since the cost of fossil fuels has been rising at an increasingly incalculable rate, heat pumps are experiencing a real boom. They are currently considered one of the most sustainable and cost-effective ways to keep your own four walls warm. To do this, they extract heat from a source, for example the air or the ground, which they then usually release back into the house via underfloor heating systems. They are very efficient at doing this, as one unit of electricity can provide up to five units of heat. The standard technology used in most heat pumps is the vapor compression cycle. It uses the evaporation and condensation of a refrigerant to transfer energy and raise the temperature. The condensation point of a refrigerant is fixed and adjustable only by the charging pressure. The technology works very efficiently at temperatures around this condensation point, but the farther the input temperature and required power are from this condensation point, the lower the efficiency.

Blue Heart Energy, a young company from Alkmaar in the Netherlands, is now demonstrating a new, sustainable technology at HANNOVER MESSE 2022 that aims to improve heat pump performance so radically that it moves from being one of the best solutions on the market to date to being perfect. To achieve this, Blue Heart uses thermoacoustics, a process that uses sound waves generated in a closed circuit to generate heat or cold, respectively. This technology, already proven in industry, is thus being used for the first time to operate heat pumps in residential buildings. Dubbed "Blue Heart" by its developers, the thermoacoustic element is intended to replace the previous heart of heat pumps in the future and has therefore been designed so that it can be easily integrated into existing systems by original equipment manufacturers. With "Blue Heart", heat pumps are to finally become an affordable, low-noise and flexible alternative that operates efficiently over a wide temperature range and is thus suitable even for older existing buildings. Just about perfect, in other words.

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