The refrigeration market is closely related to the production of beverages and food, the industrial process, the chemical and pharmaceutical industry and the automotive sector. Some of these sectors are experiencing strong growth thanks to revenues from customers in Eastern Europe, India and China; also the retail market, supermarkets and hypermarket chains are benefiting greatly from this development.
The above scenario, although positive for the industry, has consequences at the environmental level, since a greater demand implies a higher number of polluting emissions; the prediction for the year 2010 is of a level of HFC emissions equivalent to 66 Mtons of CO2, which represents an increase of 62%, compared to the value of 1995, of this percentage cooling and air conditioning are responsible for 43%.
Due precisely to the environmental effect that the HVACR industry has, it is not surprising that new greener alternatives are currently being sought, an example of this is the replacement of harmful refrigerants by others that do not affect the ozone layer, also within these alternatives are alternative refrigeration technologies, such as magnetic.
This technology works without gaseous refrigerant and its energy efficiency, in principle, can be higher than that of a conventional cooling system. As a result, their progress in certain market domains would lead to lower CO2 production in the atmosphere.
According to the IIR (International Institute of Refrigeration), magnetic cooling can be defined as: "an adiabatic cooling method that applies the magneto-caloric effect (EMC). From the point of view of basic physics, it shows an analogy with the conventional method of gas compression/expansion."
According to the organization, many scientists and industrial representatives accept that this technology has a good potential to have in the future a great penetration in the refrigeration market; are convinced that in different areas conventional cooling could be replaced by magnetic. This would open the door to the possibility of replacing HFC refrigerants with environmentally benign magneto-caloric alloys.
HFCs with a global warming potential of 1000 to 3000 times greater than that of CO2, currently show a growing sales market, which has its origin in the progressive elimination of the most destructive HCFCs and CFCs. This process is still in progress and in most developing countries HCFCs and CFCs are still allowed. Systems with natural refrigerants (ammonia, CO2, propane, etc.) are good solutions for different applications, but to date, none of them have made remarkable progress on a wide scale of applications. Another advantage would be that the efficiency is higher in magnetic cooling processes, compared to those of gas compression cooling.
