High-performance thermomagnetic generator controlled by a magnetocaloric switch

Low grade waste heat accounts for ~65% of total waste heat, but conventional waste heat recovery technology exhibits low conversion efficiency for low grade waste heat recovery. Hence, we designed a thermomagnetic generator for such applications. Unlike its usual role as the coil core or big magneti...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2023-08, Vol.14 (1), p.4811-4811, Article 4811
Main Authors: Liu, Xianliang, Chen, Haodong, Huang, Jianyi, Qiao, Kaiming, Yu, Ziyuan, Xie, Longlong, Ramanujan, Raju V., Hu, Fengxia, Chu, Ke, Long, Yi, Zhang, Hu
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/166/987
639/301/119/997
639/4077/4072/4062
Circuit design
Emissions control
Energy conservation
Heat
Heat recovery
Heat recovery systems
Humanities and Social Sciences
Magnetic circuits
Magnetic materials
multidisciplinary
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Topology
Waste heat
Waste heat recovery
Waste recovery
Waste utilization
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Summary:Low grade waste heat accounts for ~65% of total waste heat, but conventional waste heat recovery technology exhibits low conversion efficiency for low grade waste heat recovery. Hence, we designed a thermomagnetic generator for such applications. Unlike its usual role as the coil core or big magnetic yoke in previous works, here the magnetocaloric material acts as a switch that controls the magnetic circuit. This makes it not only have the advantage of flux reversal of the pretzel-like topology, but also present a simpler design, lower magnetic stray field, and higher performance by using less magnetocaloric material than preceding devices. The effects of key structural and system parameters were studied through a combination of experiments and finite element simulations. The optimized max power density P Dmax produced by our device is significantly higher than those of other existing active thermomagnetic, thermo, and pyroelectric generators. Such high performance shows the effectiveness of our topology design of magnetic circuit with magnetocaloric switch. The utilization of waste heat is an important way of combining energy saving to emission reductions. Here, authors demonstrate a magnetocaloric material as a controlling switch in a thermomagnetic generator for waste heat recovery.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/s41467-023-40634-x