Electrocaloric refrigeration and heat pumping: from theory to applications.

The article gives a review on different design concepts of electrocaloric refrigeration devices. For these concepts, the operation characteristics, estimated by numerical simulations, are shown and compared. Up to date, only few electrocaloric prototype devices were developed. Their operation confirm the basic principle of operation, however, a relatively large deviation between the numerical and experimental results can be seen. The reason for this deviation partly lies in a number of different effects (heat transfer to the environment, Joule heating, hysteresis losses, etc.). These effects are usually not taken into account when modeling an electrocaloric cooling device. Therefore the article gives more detailed information on this issue. In order to provide most realistic evaluation of the performance of the electrocaloric devices, the above mentioned effects should be incorporated within numerical models. The results obtained from such models can then provide guidelines for the construction and operation of the electrocaloric cooling devices.