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Experimental Methods for Investigation of Shape Memory Based Elastocaloric Cooling Processes and Model Validation
Published on: May 2, 2016
High-performance multimode elastocaloric cooling system
Suxin Qian1,2, David Catalini2, Jan Muehlbauer2
1Department of Refrigeration and Cryogenic Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710049, People's Republic of China.
Abstract:
Developing zero-global warming potential refrigerants has emerged as one area that helps address global climate change concerns. Various high-efficiency caloric cooling techniques meet this goal, but scaling them up to technologically meaningful performance remains challenging. We have developed an elastocaloric cooling system with a maximum cooling power of 260 watts and a maximum temperature span of 22.5 kelvin. These values are among the highest reported for any caloric cooling system. Its key feature is the compression of fatigue-resistant elastocaloric nitinol (NiTi) tubes configured in a versatile multimode heat exchange architecture, which allows the harnessing of both high delivered cooling power and large temperature spans. Our system shows that elastocaloric cooling, which only emerged 8 years ago, is a promising direction for commercializing caloric cooling.
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