Trabajo presentado a la "6th International Conference on Magnetic Refrigeration at Room Temperature" celebrada en Victoria (Canadá) del 7 al 10 de septiembre de 2014.A versatile room temperature reciprocating magnetic refrigeration demonstrator has been designed, built and tested in order to check suitable magnetocaloric materials for magnetic refrigeration. Test experiments have been done with 31 g of Gd spheres of 0.2 – 0.4 mm diameter as refrigerant material, because it is a well-known benchmark material for magnetic refrigeration. The magnetic field is provided by a Halbach Nd2Fe14B permanent magnet with a slot of 10 mm width and a maximum field of 1.4 T. At optimized values of frequency (f = 0.7 Hz) and utilization factor (U = 0.19), the demonstrator achieves a maximum no load temperature span of 19.3 K. A maximum cooling power of 6 W at zero temperature span was obtained at optimized values f = 0.31 Hz and U = 1.1. Different thermodynamic cycles have been studied looking for the optimized parameters.Peer Reviewe
