Abstract

A quarter of the UK’s CO2 emissions can be attributed to space heating and cooling. This is primarily due to heating with natural gas and cooling with compression of greenhouse gases, and in a secondary fashion due to insufficient thermal storage and poor thermal insulation. Therefore there is great interest in developing solid-state heat pumps that can replace our environmentally damaging technologies for heating and cooling, and solid-state thermal batteries that can enhance the storage of thermal energy. Thermal materials are at the core of these technologies, and during this talk I will describe my work on mechanically responsive thermal materials for heating, cooling and thermal storage applications.