A large fraction of global energy use is for refrigeration and air-conditioning, which could be decarbonized if efficient renewable energy technologies could be found. Vapour-compression technology remains the most widely used system to move heat up the temperature scale after more than 100 years; however, caloric-based technologies (those using the magnetocaloric, electrocaloric, barocaloric or elastocaloric effect) have recently shown a significant potential as alternatives to replace this technology due to high efficiency and the use of green solid-state refrigerants. Here, we report a regenerative elastocaloric heat pump that exhibits a temperature span of 15.3 K on the water side with a corresponding specific heating power up to 800W1/kg and maximum COP (coefficient-of-performance) values of up to 7. The efficiency and specific heating power of this device exceeds those of other devices based on caloric effects. These results open up the possibility of using the elastocaloric effect in various cooling and heat-pumping applications.
COBISS.SI-ID: 14935067
Elastocaloric cooling has emerged as a promising alternative to vapor compression in recent years. Although the technology has the potential to be more e ffi cient than current technologies, there are many technical challenges that must be overcome to realize devices with high performance and acceptable durability. We study the e ff ects of surface finish and training techniques on dog bone shaped polycrystalline samples of NiTi. The fatigue life of several samples with four di ff erent surface finishes was measured and it was shown that a smooth surface, especially at the edges, greatly improved fatigue life. The e ff ects of training both on the structure of the materials and the thermal response to an applied strain was studied. The load profile for the first few cycles was shown to change the thermal response to strain, the structure of the material at failure while the final structure of the material was weakly influenced by the surface finish.
COBISS.SI-ID: 14774555
This paper presents direct and indirect methods for studying the elastocaloric effect (eCE) in shape memory materials and its comparison. The eCE can be characterized by the adiabatic temperature change or the isothermal entropy change (both as a function of applied stress/strain). To get these quantities, the evaluation of the eCE can be done using either direct methods, where one measures (adiabatic) temperature changes or indirect methods where one can measure the stress-strain-temperature characteristics of the materials and from these deduce the adiabatic temperature and isothermal entropy changes. The former can be done using the basic thermodynamic relations, i.e. Maxwell relation and Clausius-Clapeyron equation. This paper further presents basic thermodynamic properties of shape memory materials, such as the adiabatic temperature change, isothermal entropy change and total entropy-temperature diagrams (all as a function of temperature and applied stress/strain) of two groups of materials (NiTi and CuZnAl alloys) obtained using indirect methods through phenomenological modelling and Maxwell relation. In the last part of the paper, the basic definition of the efficiency of the elastocaloric thermodynamic cycle (coefficient of performance) is defined and discussed.
COBISS.SI-ID: 15128091