Global climate change with unpredictable consequences jeopardizes our modern society. For a sustainable development, the EU has set a goal of becoming a carbon-neutral economy in 2050. This requires our society to change the way of using energies at the origin: abandon traditional fossil fuels such as oil and coal and embrace the renewable energies such as wind energy or solar energy. However, those two energies are not stable for the power grid. Hydrogen, as a zero-carbon-emission energy carrier, is proposed to store the renewable energies. However, liquefaction of hydrogen cost! According to one research, the cost of liquefaction counts one third of the total cost of the liquid hydrogen industry.Traditional vapor-compression based refrigeration method with a carrot efficiency less than 40%is not efficient comparing to the magnetic cooling with a carrot efficiency surpassing 60%. Research on magnetocaloric gas liquefaction would make liquid hydrogen more commercially competitive.Not triggered by but relevant for The National Hydrogen Strategy of Germany, we are developing new efficient cooling systems for the cryogenic gas liquefaction which should help establishing hydrogen as an energy carrier which enhances and completes the great energy transition. Nowadays, the gas liquefaction is highly energy-consuming. Our recently work focuses on implementing magnetocaloric refrigeration for gas liquefaction. We studied the magnetocaloric effect on a representative of the Laves phase alloys, GdNi2, which is considered as a perspective material for liquefaction of natural gases.
“Greener Society”: Magnetocaloric effect in GdNi2 for cryogenic gas liquefaction studied in magnetic fields up to 50 T
Author: Sergey Taskaev, Vladimir Khovaylo, Konstantin Skokov, Wei Liu, Eduard Bykov, Maxim Ulyanov, Dmitriy Bataev, Anastasiya Basharova, Marina Kononova, Daniil Plakhotskiy, Mikhail Bogush, Tino Gottschall, and Oliver Gutfleisch
DOI: 10.1063/5.0006281
