Caloric Micro-Cooling: Numerical modelling and parametric investigation

Abstract

Cooling systems based on the caloric effects of ferroic materials show high potential for various cooling and heat-pumping applications due to their potentially high efficiencies and the lack of any environmentally hazardous refrigerants. One of such applications that has recently gained the attention of the scientific community is micro-cooling, which can be applied for hot-spot cooling and thermal management in electronic components. In this study a comprehensive numerical analysis of a caloric micro-cooling system using elastocaloric and electrocaloric materials was performed in order to investigate the limits and potential of this technology. We demonstrated that a caloric micro-cooling system is able to cool down the electronic component below room temperature or at least stabilize it at lower temperatures compared to the case when only the heat sink is applied in an efficient way (with the COP values exceeding 10). The specific cooling capacity of the caloric micro-cooling device strongly depends on the heat sink accompanied with the caloric material and its heat transfer capabilities. The caloric device can cool the electronic component below room temperature at heat-flux densities of up to 0.35 W/cm2 and up to 1 W/cm2 if it is used together with air-cooled heat sinks and water-cooled heat sinks, respectively. Caloric cooling systems could therefore play an important role as an efficient micro-cooling technology for certain applications, in particular where under-cooling below room temperature (low-temperature electronics) is required.