Speaker
Description
Thermal management is essential for maintaining spacecraft systems and payloads within their required operating temperature ranges, supporting reliable operation and mission performance. Elastocalorics is an emerging technology for active thermal management based on solid-state refrigerants, such as shape-memory alloys, which undergo reversible, stress-induced phase transformations. Combined with solid–solid contact heat transfer, it enables heat pumping without a fluid heat-transfer circuit within the active core. Active regeneration or cascaded configurations can extend device-level temperature spans beyond the adiabatic temperature change of the elastocaloric material.
This contribution introduces the operating principle of elastocaloric technology and presents findings from the ESA-supported SPACECOOL study. The study explores space applications in which elastocaloric technology could offer benefits relative to established thermal-control solutions, reviews candidate materials and their operating temperature ranges, and uses preliminary numerical simulations to assess achievable temperature spans and coefficient of performance.
A technology de-risking roadmap is also presented, addressing key challenges in material durability, thermal interfaces and actuation, and outlining priorities for experimental validation. These activities aim to establish a basis for developing a solid-state elastocaloric breadboard demonstrator and assessing its suitability for selected space applications.