About this Abstract | 
  
   
    | Meeting | 
    MS&T23: Materials Science & Technology
       | 
  
   
    | Symposium 
       | 
    Energy Materials for Sustainable Development
       | 
  
   
    | Presentation Title | 
    Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Barocaloric Refrigeration | 
  
   
    | Author(s) | 
    Naveen Daham Weerasekera, Bikram  Bhatia | 
  
   
    | On-Site Speaker (Planned) | 
    Naveen Daham Weerasekera | 
  
   
    | Abstract Scope | 
    
Solid state refrigeration using caloric effect represents a promising alternative to vapor compression refrigeration systems (VCR) which have a high global warming potential. Recently barocaloric (BC) effect-based cooling has gained wide attention for its large caloric response. This work presents a thermodynamic and heat transfer model for a barocaloric refrigerator comprising commercially-available nitrile butadiene rubber (NBR) operating between a hot and a cold thermal reservoir. We observed that the device operating with a 2.3K temperature span and 0.1GPa pressure can achieve a coefficient of performance (COP) as high as 8 – exceeding that of VCR systems. Additionally, increasing the thermal conductivity of the BC refrigerant substantially improved the performance – increasing the COP by 3× when the refrigerant's thermal conductivity was raised up to 1Wm-1K-1.  This work demonstrates the promise of solid-state cooling devices based on soft barocaloric materials and provides a framework to quantify its performance at the device-level. |