Ferroelectric oxides for heating and cooling applications

Half of the world’s CO₂ emissions can be attributed to heating and cooling. This is primarily due to heating with natural gas and cooling with compression of greenhouse gases, which are neither environmentally friendly nor energy efficient. There is great interest in developing energy-efficient solid-state heat pumps that can replace these environmentally damaging technologies. Caloric materials are at the core of novel solid-state heat-pump technologies. During this talk I will describe our work on electrocaloric effects driven by electric field, and barocaloric effects driven by hydrostatic pressure, on ferroelectric oxides for low-carbon heating and cooling applications.