4. Refrigeration systems based on electrocaloric elements

4.1 State of the art in electrocaloric cooling applications

The first electrocaloric cooling demonstrators were published in the 1970s. An electrocaloric material generates temperature variations over time. It is therefore necessary to develop a system that can convert temporal variations into a spatial gradient, in order to cool a given zone of space by evacuating heat to another zone of space. This problem represents one of the main technological obstacles to the development of electrocaloric refrigeration systems.

We can imagine bringing the active material into contact with two heat reservoirs cyclically (directly, or with the aid of a heat transfer fluid). An alternative to the heat transfer fluid is the design of thermal switches. Epstein and Malloy in...