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MAGNOTHERM
Highly Efficient and Sustainable Cooling / Heating Solutions based on Magnetic Materials.
Dear fellow cooling enthusiasts,
Greetings from all of us here at MAGNOTHERM! This isn't a normal issue of the MAGNOZINE. This month, materials chemist Falk Münch has taken over to share our innovative work in plating microchannels.
Microchannel Plating
Hallo Leute, it’s Falk here, lover of hawaiian shirts and materials and chemical topics specialist here at MAGNOTHERM. I’m excited to speak a little more about one of the more sophisticated things we’ve done, which is a contribution to the field of magnetocalorics as a whole: – plating microchannel blocks made of magnetocaloric material. This process enhances their chemical and mechanical stability by evenly coating them with a dense copper layer which spans only a fraction of the thickness of a hair.
MAGNOTHERM's materials development follows one overarching objective: to provide performant and durable magnetocaloric regenerators at scale. The regenerators represent the burning and cooling hearts of our systems, transforming magnetic stimuli into heat and cold, which is consecutively extracted by flushing the porous solids with aqueous heat exchange solution.
This is where the cooling power is generated.
Our magnetocaloric target alloy is mostly composed of silicon, lanthanum, and iron – ignoble elements with a strong affinity towards oxygen. During its use, the porous magnetocaloric material is in constant contact with water. In this environment, the material is prone to corrosion and related performance loss. Thus, protective strategies such as coatings are required to ensure stable and robust operation of magnetocaloric cooling devices.
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Existing commercial solutions are limited, so we need to do a lot of innovation in-house. But this also gives us the opportunity to personally contribute to driving progress in the field of magnetocalorics.
Our coating processes enable us to reliably and evenly envelop regenerators – filigree porous structures composed of chemically sensitive materials – in thin shells of protective metals. This allows us to eliminate the primary weakness of the magnetocaloric material, allowing us to utilise it to bring magnetic cooling to the commercial market.
That's it from me. Back to you, Abby!
Thanks for the educational piece and all the cool pics, Falk!
Signing off for this month. Until then, #staycool!
Did you learn something new? Did anything surprise you? Leave a comment below to let us know, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next #MAGNOZINE!