Enhancing the Heat Transfer in an Active Barocaloric Cooling System Using Ethylene-Glycol Based Nanofluids as Secondary Medium

Abstract

Barocaloric cooling is classified as environmentally friendly because of the employment of solid-state materials as refrigerants. The reference and well-established processes are based on the active barocaloric regenerative refrigeration cycle, where the solid-state material acts both as refrigerant and regenerator; an auxiliary fluid (generally water of water/glycol mixtures) is used to transfer the heat fluxes with the final purpose of subtracting heat from the cold heat exchanger coupled with the cold cell. In this paper, we numerically investigate the effect on heat transfer of working with nanofluids as auxiliary fluids in an active barocaloric refrigerator operating with a vulcanizing rubber. The results reveal that, as a general trend, adding 10% of copper nanoparticles in the water/ethylene-glycol mixture carries to +30% as medium heat transfer enhancement.