  Cooling systems based on the caloric effects of ferroic materials show high
potential for various cooling and heat-pumping applications due to their
potentially high efficiencies and the lack of any environmentally hazardous
refrigerants. One of such applications that has recently gained the attention
of the scientific community is micro-cooling, which can be applied for hot-spot
cooling and thermal management in electronic components. In this study a
comprehensive numerical analysis of a caloric micro-cooling system using
elastocaloric and electrocaloric materials was performed in order to
investigate the limits and potential of this technology. We demonstrated that a
caloric micro-cooling system is able to cool down the electronic component
below room temperature or at least stabilize it at lower temperatures compared
to the case when only the heat sink is applied in an efficient way (with the
COP values exceeding 10). The specific cooling capacity of the caloric
micro-cooling device strongly depends on the heat sink accompanied with the
caloric material and its heat transfer capabilities. The caloric device can
cool the electronic component below room temperature at heat-flux densities of
up to 0.35 W/cm2 and up to 1 W/cm2 if it is used together with air-cooled heat
sinks and water-cooled heat sinks, respectively. Caloric cooling systems could
therefore play an important role as an efficient micro-cooling technology for
certain applications, in particular where under-cooling below room temperature
(low-temperature electronics) is required.
