Open AccessElectrocaloric devices part II: All-solid heat pump without moving parts
Author(s) -
Farrukh Najmi,
HE Jian-ping,
Lorenzo Cremaschi,
Zhongyang Cheng
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of advanced dielectrics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.38
H-Index - 13
eISSN - 2010-135X
pISSN - 2010-1368
DOI - 10.1142/s2010135x20500290
Subject(s) - heat sink , thermal conduction , heat pump , materials science , electric field , coefficient of performance , thermal , thermal conductivity , work (physics) , mechanical engineering , mechanics , thermodynamics , physics , heat exchanger , composite material , quantum mechanics , engineering
Various designs have been introduced to build heat pumps using the electrocaloric effect (ECE). Each of all the current designs uses at least one moving part, which significantly reduces the reliability of the pump and adds complexities. In this work, a new all-solid design is introduced, in which two layers of an electrocaloric material (ECM) are permanently sandwiched in the source and sink, which would significantly increase the device’s reliability since nothing moves and all are permanently bound together. More importantly, the electric fields applied on two ECM layers are independently controlled. A special sequence for the electric fields on two ECM layers is introduced. Numerical calculation was used to simulate the device’s performance by using the newly introduced analytical solutions for the heat conduction in the system. It is concluded that a continuous heat transformation from the source to sink at the same temperature can be achieved when the contacting coefficient, [Formula: see text], is very small, where [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text] are thermal conductivity, density, and heat capacity, respectively, while the superscript [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] represent the ECM and source/sink, respectively.