Numerical simulation of hydrogen active magnetic regenerative liquefier

This paper is focusing on a numerical investigation of hydrogen Active Magnetic Regenerative Liquefier (AMRL). For this purpose, two-dimensional transient numerical modeling with finite volume method has been developed (i.e. CFD method) to simulate the parallel plane plate (PPP) AMRL regenerators type in order to predict and investigate its thermal performances. The resulting mathematical model has been implanted in ANSYS-Fluent software to overcome the complexity of the Active Magnetic Regenerative (AMR) cycle. To run the simulations, a six cascade-stages hydrogen AMRL cycle has been proposed. From the first to the last stage, the regenerators are made of the following magnetic materials: Gd, Tb, Dy, Ho, Er and Tm respectively. The validity of the proposed model has been performed through Cristal2 AMR demonstrator built to operate at room temperature. Good agreements have been found between experimental and numerical results. Then, simulations of the proposed multistage hydrogen AMRL have been carried out for applied magnetic induction up to 7 T. It has been shown that a mass flow rate of 100 mg s(-1) of hydrogen initially at 300 K and 1 atm can be cooled down to 57 K. Thus, the capability of the proposed CFD method for predicting consistent results has been demonstrated. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.