Cooling with Electrocaloric Polymers

2026-07-22

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.

Luxembourg

2025-10-15