Investigations on Regenerator Designs for Magnetocaloric Refrigeration

Abstract

Active Magneto Caloric Regenerative Refrigeration (AMRR) system are potentially attractive alternatives to vapour compression refrigeration technology. In order to investigate the performance of an AMRR system, it is important to understand the heat transfer phenomena taking place within the regenerator. The heat transfer coefficient value of fluid channel is increased with increasing mass flow rate. The mass flow rate is a vital characteristic of heat transfer coefficient. Due to manufacturing limitation of parallel plate stack size, the selection of optimal Reynolds number for a given heat transfer coefficient is a crucial part of regenerator design. The total cycle time should generally be minimized in order to increase the cooling capacity and maximize the exergy so the transient behavior of the parallel plate temperature is also most important factor for designing the cooling system of magneto caloric refrigeration system particularly parallel plate regeneration cycle. The present study relates to the experimental validation of the temperature distribution in an AMR (Active Magnetic Regenerator) with the previous studies done numerically using CFD tools. For the same, a physical prototype of the AMR was created with rapid prototyping technology and an experimental set up was designed for validating the numerical results. The comparison of experimental and CFD results match within 15% accuracy.