Analysis for Temperature Spans Generated by Electrocaloric Cooling Tubes

Electrocaloric (EC) cooling is excellently suitable for accurate temperature control in narrow spaces such as electronic devices thanks to the customizable shapes of EC materials and electrodes. EC cooling also shows high energy utilizing efficiency, thus low energy input and low global-warming potential, which makes it the most environmentally friendly solid-state refrigeration technology. In this work, we designed an EC cooling tube in micron scales consisting of only three parts: EC polymer, polyimide tube, and fluid inside the tube. The EC polymer was applied an alternating voltage, thus releasing and absorbing heat periodically, accompanied by the reciprocating flow of the fluid. We built a finite element simulation model with moving meshes considered to find how the tube generates a temperature span between two ends of the EC cooling tube. P(VDF-TrFE-CFE) was employed as the EC polymer, and 4 different fluids were selected. The working frequency was changed to find how heat transfer influence the performance of the EC cooling tube. In all, we employed a simulation model to analyze the temperature spans generated by EC cooling tubes working with various thermal conductive fluids, and under various working frequencies, and the large temperature spans over 15 K opened the possibility for achieving targeted cooling for chips and batteries in electronic devices.