Energetic Analysis of miniaturization in cooling devices

In the near future it will be possible to build micro refrigerators, which physical dimensiones is expexted to be in order of centimeters, for cooling of buildings, vehicles, clothing, and other products or applications. This paper aim to evaluate if the actual trend of miniaturization drives to effective benefits in terms of energy saving. For this purpose various aspects influencing the efficiancy of the chillers are considered. For the efficiency of the gloabal system (user, devices and connection) spacial attention is paid to find the optiam trade off, between the advantages due to the reductions of ducting and cycling losses and the disadvantages due to the negative influence that the size gives to the performances of the system. In a case study the performance of the chiller has been analysed in a very wide range of its cooling capacity, > 10-1 W.