NiTi wire based Elastocaloric Cooling System for industrial applications

In times of global warming and rising demand for energy at the same time, energy-efficiency becomes crucial in all sectors. Nevertheless, it is expected that in the next 30 years the total energy consumption for building climatization will grow over 30 % of global energy consumption. With focus on climate neutrality and efficiency, especially in the application area of the refrigeration industry, which is dominated by vapor-compression devices, moving away from environmentally harmful refrigerants such as R-134a is crucial. Elastocaloric cooling systems based on nickel-titanium elements have shown promising developments in this area and have been classified by both the EU Commission and the US Department of Energy (DOE) as a potential alternative to current systems.

The challenge of developing a potentially commercial prototype based on current technology demonstrators can be met if the complexity of the overall system and the necessary maintenance effort is drastically reduced. For this purpose, it is desirable to achieve a modular system design, whereby the machine part with the elastocaloric material can be serviced and replaced in just a few steps.

In consideration of the above-mentioned framework conditions, a novel, compact, continuously operating air-to-air demonstrator was developed with a focus on life science applications, which is both scalable and, through targeted modularity, offers the possibility of easily replacing the solid-state shape memory materials used - wire bundles made of nickel-titanium - at any time. That way, functional fatigue of the elastocaloric materials can be addressed similar to cartridge systems in printers.