Jingyuan Xu

Jingyuan Xu is dedicated to the research and development of next-generation sustainable energy technologies, encompassing the entire process from refrigeration system modeling, component and complete system design, and manufacturing, to experimental performance validation. She also maintains close collaborations with companies such as Danfoss and Volkswagen.

In solid-state elastocaloric cooling, she and her team have developed an ultra-long-lifetime elastocaloric cooling technology using shape memory alloy films, extending the operational lifetime from around 100 cycles to over 10 million cycles, thereby enabling practical applications. The film-based elastocaloric cooling approach can be used for micro-cooling applications, such as the thermal management of electronics, lab-on-chip systems, and other miniaturized devices.

In the field of integrated thermodynamic cycles for solar systems, Jingyuan Xu and her collaborators developed and demonstrated a highly efficient "biomimetic photovoltaic leaf" that mimics the natural transpiration mechanism of plants for superior thermal management. This technology can provide a cooling power of about 590 W/m2 and reduce the temperature of photovoltaic cells by 26°C under an illumination of 1000 W/m2. Based on this innovative solution, she further explored the leaf's ability to harvest waste heat and convert it into additional thermal energy and fresh water, which significantly increases the overall solar energy utilization efficiency to over 74.5%.

In thermoacoustic and Stirling energy conversion systems, she and her team proposed a practical method that significantly improved the performance of a heat-driven thermoacoustic refrigerator. This work broke through a technical bottleneck in the efficient utilization of high-temperature thermal energy, making it applicable for scenarios using high-temperature heat sources like natural gas.