The environmental impact of solid-state materials working in an active caloric refrigerator compared to a vapor compression cooler

Caloric refrigeration is an emerging class of cooling technologies based on caloric effects detected in ferro-caloric solid-state materials. Depending of the nature of the driving field, it is possible distinguishing four main caloric refrigerations: magnetocaloric, electrocaloric, elastocaloric and barocaloric. Therefore, caloric refrigeration is based on solid-state materials, unlike vapor compression, nowadays still the most diffused cooling technique, whom employs fluids as refrigerants. Solid-state materials do not provide a direct contribution in global warming, since they do not disperse in the atmosphere, but only an indirect impact is registered when they are employed as refrigerants in cooling systems. On the other side, a vapor compression plant is characterized by both direct and indirect contributions to global warming. The main parameter to evaluate global warming impact and carbon-dioxide emissions coming out from a cooler is the Total Environmental Warming Impact (TEWI) index, which accounts both the direct and indirect contributions produced. In this paper a numerical ∆TEWI analysis is presented, comparing the environmental impact of a caloric refrigerator, operating with different caloric materials, with the one of a vapor compression cooler working with HFC134a.