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

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.