Abstract
The purpose of this study is to understand the fundamental cooling characteristics of room temperature magnetic refrigerator using an active magnetic regenerator (AMR). The AMR is one of the regeneration cycles and has four sequential processes: adiabatic magnetization, heat exchange fluid flow, adiabatic demagnetization, and fluid flow. Gadolinium particles of 0.6mm diameter are adopted as a magnetic refrigerant and fully packed into a test section. The temperature change based on the magnetocaloric effect is distributed to the hot end and the cold end with heat transport fluid. The results reveal that the AMR cycle shows the improvement of the cooling performance of the room temperature magnetic refrigerator. In addition, it is found that the temperature difference between the hot and cold ends is strongly affected by the fluid transfer volume.
