Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Magnetocaloric heating and cooling (Disrupting the cooling and heating industry: a revolutionary green, energy efficient and cost competitive magnetocaloric technology platform)
Période du rapport: 2023-12-01 au 2024-11-30
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.
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.
Within the first reporting period we have managed to build a library of magnetocaloric materials covering temperature span from -20 to +50°C. This allows us to start to build prototypes for different customers in HVAC, Commercial cooling, Data centers. We also achieved significant progress with the design of our heat exchangers, when we achieved stable production of 3D printed heat exchangers with fiber thickness bellow 250 microns. It significantly contributes to improved heat transfer capacity of the heat exchangers and improves the overall efficiency of the magnetocaloirc heat pump
We have so far demonstrated that the 3 key historic problems of magnetocaloric technology are solved with Magneto's innovation.
- Our raw materials are extremely cheap, since we reuse waste product from steel production.
- Our temperature span is already now wider than our competition. And we can expand it much wider to cover new applications not only in cooling but also heating!
- Our improved shape of heat exchangers is so efficient that we expect higher than efficiency of the new magnetocaloric heat pumps than achieve vapor compressors. That is critical milestones for commercial success of the technology.
The newly updated EU Energy efficiency directive is going in the right direction for technologies like ours. We need a regulatory environment where businesses, government entities and finally households will need to do investment decision into the heating and cooling systems based on their total cost of ownership and the lifetime environmental impact. Not on price or payback period only.
- Our raw materials are extremely cheap, since we reuse waste product from steel production.
- Our temperature span is already now wider than our competition. And we can expand it much wider to cover new applications not only in cooling but also heating!
- Our improved shape of heat exchangers is so efficient that we expect higher than efficiency of the new magnetocaloric heat pumps than achieve vapor compressors. That is critical milestones for commercial success of the technology.
The newly updated EU Energy efficiency directive is going in the right direction for technologies like ours. We need a regulatory environment where businesses, government entities and finally households will need to do investment decision into the heating and cooling systems based on their total cost of ownership and the lifetime environmental impact. Not on price or payback period only.