Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2021
26th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
Influence of the heat transfer fluid on the performance of an active magnetic regenerator: a sensitivity analysis
Submission Author:
Elias Pagnan , SC , Brazil
Co-Authors:
Elias Pagnan, Guilherme Fidelis Peixer, Hígor Feltrin Teza, Bernardo Vieira, Jaime Lozano, Jader Riso Barbosa Jr.
Presenter: Elias Pagnan
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2021.COB2021-1823
Abstract
Magnetic refrigeration presents itself as one of the most promising alternatives to vapor compression refrigeration due to potentially higher efficiencies and sustainability. This technology is based on the concept of the active magnetic regenerator (AMR), a storage-type heat exchanger subjected to alternating heat transfer fluid flow through a porous matrix formed by magnetocaloric material (MCM), which changes its temperature according to the magnetocaloric effect (MCE). The AMR performance has been studied by numerous works, however, the influence of the heat transfer fluid is usually left out or superficially analyzed. This way, the objective of the present work is to utilize an experimentally validated one-dimensional AMR model to numerically evaluate the AMR performance under the effect of varying some of the fluid thermohydraulic properties and using different existing fluids applied in thermal devices. The results for the fluid properties show that increasing the thermal conductivity has impressive impacts in the cooling capacity, furthermore, increasing the fluid density has great impacts in the pumping power and in reducing the viscous losses dominance with increasing mass flow rate. For the existing fluids, adding metallic nanoparticles to enhance water properties showed improved and promising results in terms of cooling capacity and coefficient of performance.
Keywords
magnetic refrigeration, active magnetic regenerator, Numerical simulation, performance evaluation, Heat transfer fluid
