An electrocaloric refrigerator without external regenerator

Regeneration processes are commonly used in cooling devices to improve the device performance. However, irreversible heat loss within the regenerators in many earlier designs of magnetocaloric and electrocaloric (EC) based cooling devices reduces the device performance. In this paper, an electrocaloric based refrigerator without external regenerators is proposed and studied. The regeneration process in this device is realized by direct heat exchange between contacting EC elements which are moving in opposite directions with different applied fields. Simulation results show that a 37W/cm(3) cooling power density is obtained for a T-span of 20 K while the refrigerator still maintains 57% of Carnot efficiency for a cooling device made of an EC polymer. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.