Today almost all refrigeration systems are based on compressors, which often require harmful refrigerants and typically reach 50% of the Carnot efficiency. Caloric cooling systems do not need any detrimental fluids and are expected to reach 60–70% of the Carnot limit. Current caloric systems utilise the active magnetocaloric regeneration principle and are quite cost-intensive, as it is challenging to achieve large cycle frequencies and thus high specific cooling powers with this principle. In this work, we present an alternative solution where the heat transfer from the heat exchangers to the caloric material is predicated on condensation and evaporation of a heat transfer fluid. Using thermal diodes, a directed heat flow is generated. Thereby we were able to build a cooling unit achieving a specific cooling power of 12.5 W g⁻¹ at a cycle frequency of 20 Hz, which is one order of magnitude larger than the state-of-the-art.

如今，几乎所有制冷系统都基于压缩机，这些压缩机通常需要有害的制冷剂，通常达到卡诺效率的50％。热量冷却系统不需要任何有害的液体，预计将达到卡诺限度的60–70％。当前的热量系统利用主动磁热再生原理并且成本很高，因为利用该原理实现大的循环频率并因此获得高比冷却功率是具有挑战性的。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种替代解决方案，其中从换热器到热量材料的传热是基于传热流体的冷凝和蒸发来进行的。使用热敏二极管，产生定向的热流。因此，我们能够构建一个冷却单元，实现12.5 W g的特定冷却功率^-1在20 Hz的循环频率下，比现有技术大一个数量级。