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COOLPOL ProjectCOOLPOL Project

About the project

COOLPOL - Cooling with Electrocaloric Polymers

EU EIC Pathfinder Challenges Project (1.9.2024 - 31.8.2028)

Cooling our food and houses requires today 20 % of all the energy needed in the residential sector. This share will grow to 40 % by 2040 as a direct consequence of the world population increase and the global warming effect. But the existing cooling technologies are overwhelmingly dominated by the vapour-compression systems, which is a 150 years-old technology relying on greenhouse gases and exhibiting an average efficiency around 50 %. The latter figure means that half of the energy used to run fridges and air conditioning ends up in waste heat. We clearly need to come up with cleaner and more efficient cooling principles. Electrocaloric cooling has become a more and more realistic alternative to vapour compression cooling. This principle is based on a reversible variation of temperature induced in specific materials when voltage is applied. LIST recently showed that a few grams of electrocaloric ceramics can generate a variation of temperature of 20.9 K and a cooling power of 4 W. Besides, electrocaloric polymers have a cooling potential one order of magnitude larger than ceramics. This is what we intend to develop in this project, with a clear assessment of scale up capabilities thanks to an ad hoc consortium. Hence, Arkema, world leader in electroactive polymers, will investigate electrocaloric polymers able to reach a variation of temperature larger than 5 K. KEMET, European industrial partner, will prepare thousands of multilayer capacitors based on optimized electrocaloric polymers. The PI from USTUTT, who recently published the most efficient energy recovery circuit for electrocalorics, will build electronic modules able to increase the efficiency of electrocaloric devices up to 60%. And finally, thanks to its extensive experience in making electrocaloric coolers, LIST will assemble the multilayers and the electronic modules in a proof-of-concept aiming at reaching a cooling power of 1 kW and an efficiency of 60%. If successful, this project will revolutionize cooling.

Project overview

Further information and background

We recently showed that ceramic-based electrocaloric regenerators are very interesting for cooling applications [A. Torelló et al., 2020, Science: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abb8045, J. Li et al., 2023, Science: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.adi5477]. However, the potential of polymer-based electrocaloric regenerators is more than one order of magnitude larger, thanks to a much larger voltage-driven entropy change. This is what we want to investigate in this project, namely polymer-based electrocaloric coolers. 

Hence, thanks to the recent progress made in electrocaloric polymers (ARKEMA Piezotech, France), in electrocaloric heat exchangers (Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), Luxembourg) and in electronic modules for electrocaloric cooling (University of Stuttgart, Germany) , combined with the scale up capabilities of this consortium (KEMET, Italy), the goal of this project is to make an air conditioning system with a high temperature span, a low temperature below room temperature, 1 kW-cooling power and 60 %-efficiency. This requires a multidisciplinary approach combining 1) materials science (development of efficient electrocaloric materials and associated cooling modules), 2) thermodynamics (heat exchange and efficient cycles) and 3) electrical engineering (cooling control and energy recycling to increase efficiency). 

To reach this final goal, three objectives (KO*) have been defined in this project, as sketched in above figure. 

  • Key objective 1 (KO1) – Development of electrocaloric polymers-based cooling modules (multilayer capacitors) with a high temperature variation.

  • Key objective 2 (KO2) – Fabrication of regenerative heat exchangers with electrocaloric polymer cooling modules reaching a high temperature span and a cooling power density.

  • Key objective 3 (KO3) – Reaching high efficiency (coefficient of performance COP relative to the Carnot-limit) by recycling electric energy. 

*More specific and quantitative objectives, approaches and KOs, where already defined project-internally and will be revealed in publications throughout the project duration.