PID2024 SMASHCool

Stressing Multicalorics for Advanced Solutions in Heating and Cooling

The goal of the PID2024 SMASHCool project is to achieve fundamental advances in the field of caloric refrigeration in order to overcome its technological and fundamental challenges.

Refrigeration is one of the key achievements of the 20th century, vital for modern life. It preserves food and pharmaceuticals, cool data centers and batteries, and regulates temperatures in transportation and buildings.

However, our planet is warming due to greenhouse gas emissions, and current refrigerators use vapour-compressing fluorinated gases that contribute significantly to this issue.

Conversely, heating systems heavily rely on fossil fuel-dominated technologies, that meet above 60% of energy demand.

In this context, solid-state heating and cooling are emerging as a disruptive, energy-efficient, and environmentally friendly alternative.

This innovative approach is based on the caloric effect, a fundamental thermal response exhibited by materials when an external stimulus is applied to them.

Caloric refrigeration is a new solid-state technology that promises to be an environmentally friendly alternative to current conventional systems that rely on greenhouse gases.

SMASHCool focuses on fundamental research into innovative caloric and multicaloric materials. It is material diversity-oriented and aims to uncover materials for the next generation of solid-state caloric refrigeration.

In this project, we will investigate materials that act as refrigerants when subjected to external stimuli, broadly including mechanical, electrical, and magnetic fields.

The study will be conducted from both experimental and theoretical perspectives, combining laboratory measurements with advanced physical models and first-principles calculations. The goal is to understand the microscopic mechanisms governing the thermal and mechanical properties of these materials.

We will pay special attention to the so-called multicaloric effect, which exploits cooling responses driven by multiple applied fields.

The PID2024 SMASHCool project has two lines of research and objectives:

Improving the performance and expanding the applications of mechanocaloric materials:

Mechanocaloric materials can be enhanced by refining their geometries and mechanical stress components, which will lead to improved properties better suited for specific applications.

Maximizing cooling by optimizing operating conditions under multiple external stimuli:
Multicaloric effects can be used to optimize a material’s cooling performance. The coupling of magnetism or electrical polarization with the material’s structure is fundamental and a practical variable for the design of multicaloric materials.

SMASHcool focuses on fundamental research into innovative caloric and multicaloric materials, in which atomic structure plays a key role.

The SMASHCool project builds on the PID2020-113549RB-I00 project titled “Advanced Caloric and Multicaloric Materials for Efficient and Clean Refrigeration”.

In this project, new experimental techniques will be designed and implemented to be operable over a broad temperature range at controlled atmospheres or vacuum (particularly at low temperatures), incorporating new mechanical modes such as twisting or biaxial stretching, and optimized electrodes.

SMASHCool is designed to make significant contributions to the advancement of scientific and technical knowledge in the field of caloric materials, with the purpose of moving these closer to actual applications in cooling, heating, and thermal management.

The project will deepen the scientific community’s understanding of the fundamental mechanisms underlying caloric effects, with a special emphasis on the emerging fields of mechanocaloric and multicaloric materials.

By its very nature, it covers a wide range of materials and systems, not only continuing but also opening new and groundbreaking research lines.

SMASHCool will develop advanced caloric materials that offer much cleaner energy solutions compared to current cooling methods.