Wärmepumpe der Zukunft? Magnetisch, ohne Kältemittel, leise und super effizient!

Hi guys, heat pumps are booming, sales figures are increasing rapidly and air heat pumps in particular are becoming more and more popular, probably due to their relatively low price. Most heat pumps in use today use a refrigerant that is often flammable. and very harmful to the environment. There is a lot of research on these above refrigerants, such as: Replacing R32 or methane with more environmentally friendly ones such as propane, which is also often used in gas grills, etc., for comparison, a kilo. of R32 or methane has the same climate effect for 100 years, up to 677 kilograms of CO2 and propane, on the other hand, only correspond to about 3.3 kilograms, the efficiencies of the two refrigerants will probably be comparable, but propane remains flammable and therefore these dangerous situations can also occur when measuring, and now there are completely new and completely different concepts for heat pumps and to use them something completely different and I found one particularly interesting and prudent: that is, a heat pump heat that really works through magnetic fields, it really has no refrigerant, it has no compressor, it is significantly quieter than the current ones and is even supposed to be more efficient, I'm talking about magnetocaloric heat pumps and'.

I'll tell you about it here and today I'll explain to you what it is because the concept is really exciting. I have to say I didn't know about it before and I was very, very excited about it, so how it works. It's really cool, the Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Technology is actively researching refrigeration systems and heat pumps using the magnetocaloric approach. Magnetocaloric materials are magnetizable materials that heat up when exposed to a magnetic field and cool down again when the field is removed. , so if I keep a magnetic field they get hot but when I remove it they cool down again.

And now of course the question is how can I use it to create a heat pump or a cooling circuit? In principle, it doesn't matter. either a heat pump or a refrigeration circuit. The question is always which direction do I use it. The material is magnetized and then it heats up and the liquid evaporates in this little chamber that you can see here and now comes the trick, you can do it. I see them they are basically a thermal diode, that's what they actually call it, heat can only move in one direction, yes, and that is done simply through little pressure relief valves.

The resulting steam can only go to the right and to the right. On the left, you simply cannot pass through this valve because it is always blocked in one direction. After the magnet disappears, the element cools below the initial temperature, which creates negative pressure and flows. New fluid is then added through the valve. the left and you do this continuously in a circle so you can practically do two sides, one above room temperature and one below room temperature and so the energy flows from the cold side to the warm side, so the idea is a heat pump.

Personally I thought the thermal diode was quite good because a diode is generally familiar in the electrical sector, it pretty much only allows current to flow in one direction and here it is actually done with heat and the system is impressively simple but beautiful and now The The big question is how is heat transported? Normally this is done with the refrigerant in copper pipes, so with normal air conditioning systems or heat pumps, the guys and gals at IPM have used heat pipes here and it's a very clever idea. Now it's clear why and what one of those things actually is, that's also very interesting, so first you have to see where the system actually needs power because of course I just want to keep these areas as small as possible, so I really want to put the least amount of energy into the system to pump my heat, that is, these two places are particularly important, one point is that the magnet has to move, so it has to rotate so that it can always process these different fields , The other point is where the heat has to be transported and that has been the weak point until now because that is where it is.

If pumps are actually used, energy costs increase again and unfortunately the entire efficiency advantage disappears again and the IPM guys and gals use so-called heat pipes instead. Many of you probably know these things about coolers on your laptop or computer, if you think about it now that it is just a copper tube that conducts heat well, then that is far from the case. Honestly, technically it's an absolutely brilliant concept. I think let's take a look at something like that so you can see now that there's a cavity in the middle and kind of a cavity on the outside.

Braid, so what's going on? Let's take a closer look at the beginning, now you can see here on the right that basically there is some kind of heat source, the issue is, for example, the processor on the PC that I want to cool down, which is currently hot and I want to cool it down , that's my heat source. At this point in the heat pipe there is a fluid that evaporates into the heat source and of course you have to find the right fluid, meaning it has to have the right evaporation temperature, which means I have to adjust it accordingly. somehow the heat then the vapor spreads in the middle of the pipe from all the way to the cold zone so basically it goes to the left and where I want to emit heat again, for example the heat sink of the cooler CPU or whatever. , this fluid condenses back into liquid and then goes down through the capillary effect out into the pipe and goes back to the beginning and you can already tell there is a circuit of electricity there and I always have condensation and evaporators and that's how The advantage of everything This is that the thermal resistance is significantly better than that of metals and, therefore, with very small tubes a very, very good heat transport is possible, say IPM researchers.

We were able to get by without pumps because the heat removal works passively and a pump was simply no longer necessary, so again I think it's a pretty good idea, efficiency and readiness for the market, you can already tell that this is a relatively new system that Not much research has been done yet, but let's try to find out what we know about efficiency. We are talking about the coefficient of performance or coefficient of performance, which describes how much thermal energy I add to the electricity used. With a 5 head, for example, you would plug in one kilowatt of electricity and pump 5 kilowatt hours of heat from outside to inside and that's, colloquially put, like 500% efficiency.

Yes, because I take the heat from the outside and pump it in, which means I don't heat anything directly, I just pump it in. Yes, now of course the question is what is the performance of this type of heater. heat pump and I have found one for the basket, let's start the first time you look at it and Norio will have a lot of fun for you. In this scientific publication a simulation was carried out to assess how. How useful the system is from a technical point of view and what performance figures or temperatures are really possible with it.

The values ​​are briefly compared to a Viessmann Vitocal 200, this is a salt water heat pump; the comparison is probably not as complete as in the previous study. This was a simulation, but it is basically an evaluation of whether the magnetocaloric heat pump can increase and if there is at least a trend towards it. In the end, it all depends on the efficiency of the entire system. So let's see if there are already practical examples and prototypes that the German company Würmer AG has. In fact, once such a system was launched on the market, a head value of around five was given for a normal space heater. , but that's not really significant because this value depends on the outside temperature or the temperature difference, so you can easily do a lot of interesting calculations here.

Since the company is now insolvent, the number has a particularly mild aftertaste, so different data is needed to be able to make truly meaningful assessments. The already mentioned Institute of Physical Measurement Technology of the Fraunhofer Institute, that is, the IPM I just talked about, is actively researching the concept of magnetocaloric refrigeration or heat pumps. It should achieve performance figures above 5 and is already running at 300 watts, although unfortunately I was not given any more data here either. I then wrote to the scientist responsible for the project, Dr. Bartholomae, and he agreed to do so to answer some questions. with me in the next few weeks and then I will probably be able to offer you some more details or a look at this mega exciting research, so thank you very much for that, I really find the topic extremely exciting and also note that it is still a very new topic and we may still be in a relatively early stage and the move with a new system into a highly competitive area such as refrigeration or heat pumps is probably anything but simple, of course there are already many of the best because they have been doing this for years and work very economically .

It needs to be addressed first, but overall I find the benefits of the system so compelling that I'd be surprised if they didn't do it again. in the next few years and I would like to know more about this, but as I said, I am now looking forward to speaking with Dr. Bartholomae from IPM, who can certainly give me a deeper insight and perhaps also give me his assessment of how he sees it, I was really very excited yeah if you liked it leave me a subscribe and like and also check out our podcast below which you can find on all common platforms and otherwise I'm saying goodbye until next time.