Plenary: Stefan Seelecke, Saarland University
“Elastocalorics – Cool into the future?!”
Elastocalorics is an innovative, disruptive heating and cooling technology that – due to its high energy efficiency and absolute climate friendliness – has been declared as the most promising alternative to existing vapor compression technologies by the EU Commission and the US Department of Energy.
The technology is based on the exceptional heating and cooling capacity of special metals, so-called shape memory alloys made of, e.g., nickel-titanium. During simple mechanical loading and unloading of superelastic shape memory alloys, considerable amounts of latent heat are released or absorbed through phase transformations in the crystal lattice. This can lead to temperature differences of around 40 K already with currently available materials originally developed for biomedical applications.
The lecture gives an overview of preliminary experimental investigations to identify thermodynamically optimized processes as well as the development of different demonstrator concepts as a blueprint for future heating and cooling machines.