Size effects of electrocaloric cooling in ferroelectric nanowires

Considering finite size effect, ferroelectric nanowires may show novel phenomena compared to ferroelectric thin film and bulk. Here we investigated the effect of width and surface compressive stress on electrocaloric cooling in ferroelectric nanowire by using thermodynamic calculations and phase-field simulations. It was found that the isothermal entropy change and adiabatic temperature change in nanowire are 50% larger than that in thin film due to different mechanical boundary conditions of nanowire and thin film. The largest electrocaloric temperature changes were shown to increase significantly either with the decrease in nanowire width or the increase with the surface compressive stress. It was also revealed that the largest intrinsic entropy changes are almost the same for different nanowires with different widths and various stresses. The present study therefore contributes to the understanding of size effects of electrocaloric cooling and provides guidance for experiments to design high-efficiency cooling devices using ferroelectric nanosystems.