  Magnetic refrigeration at room temperature is of great interest due to a
long-term goal of making refrigeration more energy-efficient, less noisy and
free of any environmentally hostile materials. A refrigerator utilizing an
active magnetic regenerator (AMR) is based on the magnetocaloric effect, which
manifests itself as a temperature change in magnetic materials when subjected
to a varying magnetic field. In this work we present the current state of
magnetic refrigeration research at Risoe DTU with emphasis on the numerical
modeling of an existing AMR test machine. A 2D numerical heat-transfer and
fluid-flow model that represents the experimental setup is presented.
Experimental data of both no-heat load and heat load situations are compared to
the model. Moreover, results from the numerical modeling of the permanent
magnet design used in the system are presented.
