A quantitative comparison of electrocaloric cooling systems from an exergy-based thermodynamic analysis

Electrocaloric (EC) refrigeration represents a promising solution for active solid-state thermal management of electronic devices. However, EC cooling remains at an early developmental stage, with insufficient understanding of its thermodynamic processes and a lack of rational performance evaluation metrics. This work systematically analyzes EC thermodynamics and introduces an exergy-based metric enabling unified assessment of cooling capacities and temperature spans for an EC device. We also fabricated an EC flat-panel cooling device and developed an experimentally validated model. The single-layer device employing double-bond modified polymers (DMP) as the active EC material demonstrated the highest specific cold exergy rate of 111.3 mWg −1 and an exergy efficiency of 55.7%. We developed a cascaded EC cooling device that delivers 4.3 times the specific cold exergy rate of that of the single-layer device. These results establish actionable pathways for EC refrigeration optimization, driving significant performance enhancement.