Vibration induced refrigeration using ferroelectric materials

Anuruddh Kumar; Aditya Chauhan; Satyanarayan Patel; Nikola Novak; Rajeev Kumar; Rahul Vaish

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-40159-8

Vibration induced refrigeration using ferroelectric materials

Sci Rep. 2019 Mar 8;9(1):3922. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-40159-8.

Authors

Anuruddh Kumar¹, Aditya Chauhan², Satyanarayan Patel³, Nikola Novak³, Rajeev Kumar⁴, Rahul Vaish⁴

Affiliations

¹ School of Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, Mandi, H.P, 175 001, India. anuruddh_kumar@students.iitmandi.ac.in.
² Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB3 0FS, UK.
³ Institute of Materials Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt, 64287, Darmstadt, Germany.
⁴ School of Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, Mandi, H.P, 175 001, India.

Abstract

This article aims to propose a cantilever based cooling device employing non-axis symmetric placement of bulk ferroelectric patches. Ambient mechanical vibrations produce large stresses in cantilevers resulting in elastocaloric effect associated with ferroelectrics. Further, design allows cascading of several cantilevers to achieve large cooling response. A finite element analysis of the system was performed using material properties of bulk 0.50Ba(Zr_0.2Ti_0.8)O₃-0.50(Ba_0.7Ca_0.3)TiO₃. An individual element could produce a peak elastocaloric effect of 0.02 K (324 K); whereas the proposed system could achieve a temperature drop of 0.2 K within 50 seconds (10 elements, 1.5 Hz). Furthermore, net cooling can be further improved about ~2 K (using 10 cantilevers) for a starting temperature of 358 K. This study shows that elastocaloric effect in ferroelectric materials is capable of converting waste mechanical vibration into refrigeration effect which is not reported so far.