Topic: Magnetocaloric Cooling and Energy Harvesting Systems
Speaker: Prof. Raju V. Ramanujan , Nanyang Technological University
Time: 9:00, October 11, 2017
Venue: Room 205, Building 14, Wushan Campus

Abstract：Magnetocaloric materials offer an outstanding opportunity to develop novel, energy efficient, environmentally friendly, green thermal management systems. The energy efficiency has already been demonstrated to be vastly superior to conventional gas compression systems. The main obstacle to commercialization is the cost of conventional magnetocaloric materials which are based on expensive rare earth materials, e.g., Gd. Hence, we developed rare earth free, low cost, high performance Fe and Mn based magnetocaloric materials.
A self-pumping magnetic cooling system was constructed with magnetic nanoparticles in a suspension used as the ferrofluid. It was found that the system performance depends strongly on heat load, magnetic field, and volume fraction of particles and density of ferrofluid. Cooling by ~ 35 °C has been achieved by application of a small 0.3 T magnetic field. This technique has considerable potential for electronic cooling applications since there is no external energy input and no moving mechanical part.