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Reducing carbon emissions is an urgent problem around the world while facing the energy and environmental crises. Whatever progress has been made in renewable energy research, efforts made to energy-saving technology is always necessary. The energy consumption from fluid power systems of industrial processes is considerable, especially for pneumatic systems. A novel isothermal compression method was proposed to lower the energy consumption of compressors. A porous medium was introduced to compose an isothermal piston. The porous medium was located beneath a conventional piston, and gradually immerged into the liquid during compression. The compression heat was absorbed by the porous medium, and finally conducted with the liquid at the chamber bottom. The heat transfer can be significantly enhanced due to the large surface area of the porous medium. As the liquid has a large heat capacity, the liquid temperature can maintain constant through circulation outside. This create near-isothermal compression, which minimizes energy loss in the form of heat, which cannot be recovered. There will be mass loss of the air due to dissolution and leakage. Therefore, the dissolution and leakage amount of gas are compensated for in this method. Gas is dissolved into liquid with the pressure increasing, which leads to mass loss of the gas. With a pressure ratio of 4:1 and a rotational speed of 100 rpm, the isothermal piston decreased the energy consumption by 45% over the conventional reciprocation piston. This gain was accomplished by increasing the heat transfer during the gas compression by increasing the surface area to volume ratio in the compression chamber. Frictional forces between the porous medium and liquid was presented. Work to overcome the frictional forces is negligible (0.21% of the total compression work) under the current operating condition.

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Two dimensional (2D) multiferroic materials have great potential for miniaturized electronic and high-density multi-states data storage devices due to the coexistence of electric and spin polarization. Because the origins of magnetism and ferroelectricity are mutually exclusive and difficult to coexist, there are still rare to date 2D multiferroic semiconductors with good performance. Here, we propose a 2D multiferroic material, VSI2 monolayer, which has both ferromagnetic and ferroelectric properties by first principles calculation. It shows robust ferroelectricity with an appropriate switching barrier (∼140 meV), and the in-plane ferroelectric polarization is 1.44 × 10−10 C/m. At the same time, the VSI2 monolayer magnetic easy axis is along the b-axis direction and owns a large magnetic anisotropy energy (MAE) (512 μeV/V-ion). Based on Monte Carlo simulations of the Heisenberg model, the Curie temperature (TC) is calculated to be approximately 92 K. In addition, biaxial strain can significantly change the MAE, and the in-plane magnetic easy axis can be switched to the out-of-plane direction by 5% biaxial tensile strain. In particular, we can change the magnetic moment at the two ends of VSI2 nanoribbons by switching the direction of electric polarization, providing an opportunity for the application of magnetic-electric control and memory devices. Our theoretical prediction provides a good platform for studying the 2D multiferroic effects and spintronic properties.