An electrocaloric refrigerator with direct solid to solid regeneration

Abstract

Regenerative cooling has been used to improve the efficiency of refrigerators. Recently, exploiting the easy controlling of the electric fields, a regenerative electrocaloric (EC) cooling device with direct solid to solid regeneration has been proposed. Here, we report an experimental study of such an EC cooling device. For the EC device to be operated at a household voltage, the EC multilayer ceramic elements were first developed employing the multilayer ceramic capacitor fabrication technique. Under a voltage of 200 V, the EC multilayers with the commercial Y5V ceramic composition exhibit an electric field induced temperature change ΔT of 0.86 K. Testing results of a prototype EC device based on these EC multilayer elements show that even with only two EC rings, which is the minimum unit required to demonstrate the operation, such an EC device can generate a temperature span between hot and cold ends about three times of ΔT of the EC multilayers.