Abstract
Elastocaloric cooling, also known as thermoelastic cooling, has been identified as a promising alternative to current state-of-the-art vapour compression cooling systems which tend to use environmentally unfriendly refrigerants. In this study, five different types of rubbers including natural rubber, silicone rubber, cis-butadiene rubber, styrene-butadiene rubber and chlorosulfonated polyethylene were investigated as working materials for thermoelastic cooling applications. A setup and protocol was developed to investigate and quantify the cooling effect of the rubbers during stretching and releasing cycles. The results show that for all five rubbers, the mechanical response of the stress–strain curve depends on the maximum loading. This is previously studied and named as Mullins effect. Such effect was negated after nine cycles of loading andunloading. The Coefficient Of Performance (COP) for the studied materials were quantified to compared to the performance of the investigated working materials. The natural rubber was found to be the working material with the best performance worth further exploration with a COP of more than 2. The cycle analysis of this material shows that the temperature difference of such system is around 7 K which shows a great potential for applications in cooling systems.
NSTL
Elsevier