Thermal investigations of an experimental active magnetic regenerative refrigerator operating near room temperature

• A 1 D numerical model is presented for thermal analysis of AMR devices.
• A magnetic cooling demonstrator is used to investigate the validity of the model.
• Thermal performances of the demonstrator have been investigated.
• Comparisons between simulation and experimental results have been presented.

In this paper, numerical and experimental investigations on a magnetic refrigeration device based upon the active magnetic regeneration (AMR) cycle operating near room temperature are presented. A numerical 1D model based on the transient energy equations is proposed for modelling the heat exchange between the magnetocaloric material and the carrier fluid in the regenerator bed. The validity of 1D AMR-numerical model is investigated through the recently developed magnetic cooling demonstrator by Clean Cooling Systems SA (CCS) at the University of Applied Sciences of western Switzerland (HES−SO). The obtained results including the temperature span, the coefficient of performance and the cooling power are presented and discussed. In general, good agreements have been noted between the experimental and numerical results.