SET Proceedings 2978-4387 Caravel Press 10.65582/set.2015.126 2015.126 Computational Investigation of Unsteady Conjugated Heat Transfer in Microchannel Active Magnetic Regenerator KamranMuhammad Sajid SunJie AliHassan ZhangHu LongYi WangHua Sheng h.s.wang@qmul.ac.uk School of Engineering and Materials Science, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan Institue of Engineering Thermophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China School of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China 06072016 14 2 978-0-85358-314-1 384 395 6 July 2016 © 2015 Copyright WSSET 2016

Materials such as Gd and LaFeCoSi alloy show significant entropy or temperature change during magnetisation and demagnetisation in a varying magnetic field. This is referred to as the magnetocaloric effect (MCE) on which room temperature magnetic refrigeration operation is based. An active magnetic regenerator (AMR), made of magnetocaloric material (MCM), is one of the key components of a room temperature magnetic refrigerator/heat pump. The working fluid, normally water, oscillates in the AMR and therefore the heat transfer in the AMR is essentially transient. The AMR in the present work is a microchannel heat exchanger made of Gd MCM. The paper describes a computational model of the transient conjugated conductive heat transfer in MCM microchannel wall and convective heat transfer in fluid flow in channels. The model is solved using Ansys Fluent. The temperature span, transient variation of Nu and effect of the ratio of channel spacing to diameter (porosity) are examined. Heat transfer enhancement and AMR dimension optimisation are presented.

 Magnetic refrigeration Active magnetic regenerator Transient conjugate heat transfer Heat transfer enhancement Numerical simulation 25 to 27 August 2015 14th International Conference on Sustainable Energy Technologies SET2015 14 Nottingham, United Kingdom