Advancing Elastocaloric Refrigeration through Co-design of Materials and Systems

Space exploration applications require high volumetric and gravimetric power density cooling systems for personal climate control, thermal management of sensitive components, and cooling of sensors. Elastocaloric refrigeration has been limited by 1) lack of high performance elastocaloric effect (ECE) materials developed specifically with appropriate materials-level performance metrics in mind, and 2) limited application of co-design principles to couple ECE materials and refrigeration systems development. We propose to develop a prototype high efficiency ECE refrigerator, specifically designed to increase system-level gravimetric and volumetric cooling power density over state-of-the-art (SOTA) by 2× to 10×. This research project will consist of: (i) developing an irreversible thermodynamic model capable of quantifying materials response to active regenerative thermal and load cycles, (ii) data-enabled materials design of high performance ECE materials based on relevant figures of merit, and (iii) co-design of a multi-zone active regenerative ECE refrigerator to evaluate the interaction between materials properties and system-level performance. We will develop a prototype demonstrator system, to evaluate (i) scaling relationships with total cooling power, and (ii) use of a refrigerator architecture to achieve a larger working DT (up to a design target of 30 K) across a multi-zone active regenerator, and higher cycle frequencies (to 1 Hz).

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