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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 13962 |
| Journal | Scientific Reports |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 1 2017 |
Funding
This work was sponsored by the U. S. Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office. The authors would like to acknowledge Mr. Antonio Bouza the Technology Manager for the HVAC & Appliances for his support. We would like to thank Dr. Alexander Barcza and Dr. Hugo Vieyra for providing the magnetocaloric properties of the
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| U. S. Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office |