Abstract
A numerical analysis was conducted to study a room temperature magnetocaloric refrigerator with a 16-layer parallel plates active magnetic regenerator (AMR). Sixteen layers of LaFeMnSiH having different Curie temperatures were employed as magnetocaloric material (MCM) in the regenerator. Measured properties data was used. A transient one dimensional (1D) model was employed, in which a unique numerical method was developed to significantly accelerate the simulation speed of the multi-layer AMR system. As a result, the computation speed of a multi-layer AMR case was very close to the single-layer configuration. The performance of the 16-layer AMR system in different frequencies and utilizations has been investigated using this model. To optimize the layer length distribution of the 16-layer MCMs in the regenerator, a set of 137 simulations with different MCM distributions based on the Design of Experiments (DoE) method was conducted and the results were analyzed. The results show that the 16-layer AMR system can operate up to 84% of Carnot cycle COP at a temperature span of 41 K, which cannot be obtained using an AMR with fewer layers. The DoE results indicate that for a 16-layer AMR system, the uniform distribution is very close to the optimized design.
Highlights
The magnetocaloric effect (MCE) is a phenomenon where a temperature change of a magnetocaloric material is caused by exposing the material to a changing magnetic field
In order to provide the largest temperature span across the active magnetic regenerator (AMR), or the largest MCE in the entire AMR, several different magnetocaloric material (MCM) with different Curie temperatures must be layered along its length
Qc and COP for different utilization and frequencies for single layer AMR have been well investigated by the previous work experimentally, e.g. Trevizoli et al and Trevizoli et al.[46,47], so the discussions will focus on the performance of the 16-layer AMR
Summary
The magnetocaloric effect (MCE) is a phenomenon where a temperature change of a magnetocaloric material is caused by exposing the material to a changing magnetic field. Among the newly discovered materials, the LaFeSi based ones are very promising candidates as the working materials for magnetic refrigeration at room temperature. Even though their adiabatic temperature change is about the same as Gd, LaFeSi based MCMs have higher entropy change. In order to provide the largest temperature span across the AMR, or the largest MCE in the entire AMR, several different MCMs with different Curie temperatures must be layered along its length. They discovered that for the no-load conditions, the largest performance improvements were observed in the two-layer regenerators
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