Performance enhancement of a compressive thermoelastic cooling system using multi-objective optimization and novel designs

Thermoelastic cooling is a recently proposed, novel solid-state cooling technology. It has the benefit of not using high global warming potential (GWP) refrigerants which are used in vapor compression cycles (VCCs). Performance enhancements on a thermoelastic cooling prototype were investigated. A few novel design options aiming to reduce the cyclic loss were proposed. It was found that the maximum temperature lift increased from 6.6 K to 27.8 K when applying the proposed novel designs, corresponding to 0-152 W cooling capacity enhancement evaluated under 10 K water-water system temperature lift. In addition, a multi-objective optimization problem was formulated and solved using the genetic algorithm to maximize the system capacity and coefficient of performance (COP). With all the novel designs, the optimization could further enhance 31% COP, or 21% cooling capacity, corresponding to COP of 4.1 or 184 W maximum cooling capacity.