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Cooling with cork: envisaging its giant compressive mechanocaloric effect for solid-state cooling devices

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Abstract

The urgent need for reducing greenhouse gasses leads to the search for better alternatives that do not compromise the environment. Traditional refrigeration devices, for example, use harmful gasses as refrigerants and consume a lot of energy worldwide. Solid-state cooling devices based on mechanocaloric effects can be a better alternative that uses sustainable and eco-friendly materials with the potential to be more energy-efficient. Here, we study the compressive mechanocaloric effect in agglomerated cork: a natural, renewable, and sustainable material that has been used for centuries. We report giant values of entropy and temperature changes around room temperature, which peaks at the phase transition of suberin, a major component of cork. The results are promising and compete with the best mechanocaloric materials in the literature reported so far.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge financial support from CNPq (INCT-RT—National Institutes of Science and Technology—Refrigeration and Thermophysics through grant CNPq 404023/2019-3), UNIFESP and UEM. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001.

Funding

This study was funded by CNPq (Grant Number 309324/2019–0).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Engenharia Química, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Diadema, SP, 09913-030, Brazil

    Erik Oda Usuda & Alexandre Magnus Gomes Carvalho

  2. Departamento de Engenharia Mecânica, Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Maringá, PR, 87020-900, Brazil

    Jean Rodrigo Bocca, Flávio Clareth Colman, Gabriel Fornazaro, Alexandre Magnus Gomes Carvalho, Cleber Santiago Alves & Silvia Luciana Fávaro

  3. Instituto de Física Gleb Wataghin, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, SP, 13083-859, Brazil

    Lucas Soares Paixão

  4. Departamento de Química, Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Maringá, PR, 87020-900, Brazil

    Eduardo Radovanovic

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  1. Erik Oda Usuda
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  2. Jean Rodrigo Bocca
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  9. Silvia Luciana Fávaro
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Contributions

EOU contributed to writing—original draft, data curation, and formal analysis. JRB contributed to methodology, investigation, and formal analysis. LSP contributed to formal analysis. FCC contributed to investigation. ER contributed to investigation. GF contributed to investigation. AMGC contributed to supervision, conceptualization, and methodology. CSA contributed to supervision, conceptualization, and methodology. SLF contributed to project administration, supervision, conceptualization, methodology, and resources. All authors contributed to writing—review and editing.

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Correspondence to Silvia Luciana Fávaro.

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Usuda, E.O., Bocca, J.R., Paixão, L.S. et al. Cooling with cork: envisaging its giant compressive mechanocaloric effect for solid-state cooling devices. J Mater Sci 57, 17700–17710 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-022-07749-w

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