Investigation on the two-stage active magnetic regenerative refrigerator for liquefaction of hydrogen

Abstract

An active magnetic regenerative refrigerator (AMRR) is expected to be useful for hydrogen liquefaction due to its inherent high thermodynamic efficiency. Because the temperature of the cold end of the refrigerator has to be approximately liquid temperature, a large temperature span of the active magnetic regenerator (AMR) is indispensable when the heat sink temperature is liquid nitrogen temperature or higher. Since magnetic refrigerants are only effective in the vicinity of their own transition temperatures, which limit the temperature span of the AMR, an innovative structure is needed to increase the temperature span. The AMR must be a layered structure and the thermophysical matching of magnetic field and flow convection effects is very important. In order to design an AMR for liquefaction of hydrogen, the implementation of multi-layered AMR with different magnetic refrigerants is explored with multi-staging. In this paper, the performance of the multi-layered AMR using four rare-earth compounds (GdNi2, Gd0.1Dy0.9Ni2, Dy0.85Er0.15Al2, Dy0.5Er0.5Al2) is investigated. The experimental apparatus includes two-stage active magnetic regenerator containing two different magnetic refrigerants each. A liquid nitrogen reservoir connected to the warm end of the AMR maintains the temperature of the warm end around 77 K. High-pressure helium gas is employed as a heat transfer fluid in the AMR and the maximum magnetic field of 4 T is supplied by the low temperature superconducting (LTS) magnet. The temperature span with the variation of parameters such as phase difference between magnetic field and mass flow rate of magnetic refrigerants in AMR is investigated. The maximum temperature span in the experiment is recorded as 50 K and several performance issues have been discussed in this paper.