System Simulation of an Elastocaloric Heating and Cooling Device Based on SMA

Abstract Elastocaloric (EC) cooling uses solid-state NiTi-based shape memory alloy (SMA) as a non-volatile cooling medium and enables a novel environment-friendly cooling technology. Due to the high specific latent heats activated by mechanical loading/unloading, substantial temperature changes are generated in the material. Accompanied by a small required work input, a high coefficient of performance is achievable. Recently, a fully functional and illustrative continuous operating elastocaloric air cooling system based on SMA was developed and realized. To assist the design process of an optimized device with given performance and efficiency requirements, a fully coupled thermo-mechanical system-level model of the multi-wire cooling unit was developed and implemented in MATLAB. The resulting compact simulation tool is qualified for massively parallel computation, which allows fast and comprehensive parameter studies. In this work, the influence of different SMA diameters, rotation frequencies, and airflow rates is investigated. The results are analyzed to find the suited parameter for high efficiency (COP) and temperature span.