Demonstration of High Efficiency Elastocaloric Cooling with Large Delta- T Using NiTi Wires
Vapor compression (VC) is by far the most dominant technology for meeting all cooling and refrigeration needs around the world. It is a mature technology with the efficiency of modern compressors approaching the theoretical limit, but its envi-ronmental footprint remains a global problem. VC refrigerants such as hydrochlo-roflurocarbons (HCFCs) and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) are a significant source of green house gas (GHG) emissions, and their global warming potential (GWP) is as high as 1000 times that of CO2. It is expected that building space cooling and re-frigeration alone will amount to {approx} 5% of primary energy consumption and {approx}5% of all CO2 emission in U.S. in 2030 . As such, there is an urgent need to develop an al-ternative high-efficiency cooling technology that is affordable and environmentally friendly. Among the proposed candidates, magnetocaloric cooling (MC) is currently received a lot of attention because of its high efficiency. However, MC is inherently expensive because of the requirement of large magnetic field and rare earth materi-als. Here, we demonstrate an entirely new type of solid-state cooling mechanism based on the latent heat of reversible martensitic transformation. We call it elasto-caloric cooling (EC) after the superelastic transformation of austenite it utilizes. The solid-state refrigerant of EC is cost-effective, and it completely eliminates the use of any refrigerants including HCFCs/HFCs. We show that the COP (coefficient of per-formance) of a jugular EC with optimized materials can be as high as > 10 with measured {Delta}T of 17 C.
- Research Organization:
- Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-76RL01830
- OSTI ID:
- 1049013
- Report Number(s):
- PNNL-SA-80160; APPLAB; WN0219042; TRN: US201217%%284
- Journal Information:
- Applied Physics Letters, Vol. 101, Issue 7; ISSN 0003-6951
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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