Heating and cooling are the largest consumers of electricity globally, and their role will only grow with the electrification of heating and the increasing cooling demands from newly built AI data centers. Any inefficiency in heating and cooling systems significantly impacts global electricity demand, threatening the stability of our energy supply.
There is a worldwide effort to push the industry toward higher efficiency systems. In the EU, for example, this is represented by the Energy Efficiency Directive, which requires member states to enforce the adoption of more efficient systems by companies and government entities. This implementation is already underway.
This raises the question: Can the current technology, which relies on refrigerants and vapor compressors, be a viable solution?
Unfortunately, the answer is no. The most efficient refrigerants are unsustainable and have been globally banned by the Montreal Protocol and its subsequent Kigali Amendment (effective from 2019). The entire heating and cooling industry, under pressure to be more sustainable, has shifted to less efficient refrigerants—such as the migration of commercial cooling to CO2 systems.
From a physics perspective, only a few processes could provide the foundation for a new, efficient, and environmentally friendly heating and cooling medium. These include:
• Compression of solid materials (barocaloric)
• Compression of sound waves (thermoacoustic)
• Stretching of solids (elastocaloric)
• Use of electricity (electrocaloric)
• And our Magnetocaloric technology, which is based on solid materials that heat up when magnetized and cool down when the magnetic field is removed.
Magnetocaloric heat pumps, which use this magnetocaloric material and water for heating and cooling, offer significant advantages over other methods. They excel in efficiency, have a long lifespan, and are broadly applicable. Magnetocaloric heat pumps are up to 30% more efficient than vapor compressors and fully comply with all environmental regulations, making them a promising solution to this problem.
While magnetocaloric heat pumps have been validated multiple times in the past, they have faced challenges with the magnetocaloric material and heat exchangers. These systems used rare earth elements, which made them prohibitively expensive, and their limited temperature range restricted their application to indoor appliances. Additionally, they never reached their full efficiency potential due to compromises in the design of heat exchangers and the difficulty of shaping materials to maximize heating/cooling efficiency.
Magneto changes that. Our patented magnetocaloric heat exchangers allow magnetocaloric heat pumps to enter the market with high efficiency and an affordable price. If we succeed in our mission, we will revolutionize the way humanity generates heating and cooling.
Our heat exchangers operate across a wide temperature range, from -80°C to +200°C. We hold patents on the only magnetocaloric material composition that contains no rare earth elements, with raw material costs as low as 3 euros/kg. Additionally, our patented 3D-printed heat exchanger designs outperform previous generations by a significant margin.
Our EIC Accelerator project is focused on validating our technology with heat pump manufacturers and exploring ways to scale up our production process.
