Transforming home refrigeration with efficient and flexible magnetic cooling

Cooling is energy intensive: overall it consumes up to 14% of Britain's electricity (17% globally, according Didier Coulomb, President of the International Institute of Refrigeration - IIR) and £5.2 billion each year is spent on energy for "cold" across the UK grid and transport networks. Yet, compared to electricity production, transport and heat, "cold" has received more limited attention in the international energy debate. With the recent Kigali amendment (2016) to the Montreal Protocol, phasing out HFC refrigerant gases, and the new Paris Accords (2015) on climate change, technical innovation in refrigeration and cooling should now be a priority.

In the UK the largest cooling segment is domestic refrigeration, consuming ~5% of the UK's electricity. Worldwide around 180 million new domestic refrigeration appliances are sold annually, in a global market worth $60 billion per annum. Appliance manufacturers face the twin challenges of strong competition and environmental regulation to improve energy efficiency (eco-design directives) and recyclability (WEEE directives)

This project is focused on a disruptive new cooling technology, that uses recyclable permanent magnets and special metal alloys, is gas-free, operates at low pressure, is completely safe and is adaptable to different global market environments. By exploiting the major advantages of this technology, we can enable a step-change improvement in appliance energy efficiency - up to 75% reduction in power consumption compared to even the best fridge appliance on the market today, whilst completely redefining the concept of a domestic fridge in the home. For consumers it means (for the first time in over a century) a range of new cooling functions can be enabled (such as on-demand cooling and distributed cooling).

Camfridge, a spin-out from the University of Cambridge, is a research performing SME, a leading developer worldwide of magnetic cooling technology, holding several patents in the field. Imperial College London is a world-class research university with all the necessary facilities and expertise in micro structural analysis and magnetic materials. This collaboration will address several roadblocks to commercialisation of this innovative new technology:

* Show that magnetic cooling unlocks innovative uses for cooling in home, including cooling when and where it is needed for on-demand and distributed functionality.
* Demonstrate robustness and longevity of the refrigerant materials, and deliver quality control measures to improve mass production methods.
* Elevate expectations about cooling efficiency by reducing home cooling power consumption by 75% (or equivalently improving home cooling appliance efficiency by 400%).