ELICiT: un grand succès à ThermagVII

At the occasion of Thermag VII conference held in Turin, Italy, attended by approximately 200 delegates of which more than 70 came from companies, the IIR organised, coordinated and facilitated the last ELICiT workshop held on September 14th 2016.
The workshop was attended by 60 participants mainly from industry. The ELICiT project coordinator, Raffaele Paganini from Whirlpool R&D, opened the workshop by introducing the objectives and the structure of the project. The results and achievements of the project were presented by the other partners.


In particular, Alessandro Pastore from Camfridge presented the highly scalable industrial processes developed by Camfridge for manufacturing a compact and low cost magnetic cooling engine for high-efficiency domestic appliances. Several preliminary results of the magnetic cooling engine obtained in various operational environments limited by the availability of the magnetocaloric material were presented, as well as a clear Commercial Exploitation plan.


Marcel van Beek from Re/Gent presented the results related to the design of low cost heat exchangers for a domestic refrigerator cabinet taking into consideration the magnetic cooling engine operational specifications.


Stefano Guarino from SCIRE presented the results of the characterization of innovative metal foam to be used in heat exchangers. These results are a world premiere and allowed the design of innovative, high performing heat exchangers.


Thomas Michineau from Cemafroid presented the different EU regulations applicable to magnetic refrigerators with an emphasis on new international test standard IEC: 62552-2015.


Rossella Luglietti from Politecnico di Milano presented the Simulation Toolbox based on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and the Life Cycle Costing (LCC) principles developed during the ELICiT project that allowed for the economic and environmental assessment both of components and of the magnetically cooled domestic refrigerator already at the design stage.

Rossella also presented the environmental assessment of the domestic refrigerator using the gas compressor. One insightful result of this work was that the pre-industrial and industrial phase of traditional refrigerator presents an environmental impact of equivalent magnitude of the magnetically cooled domestic refrigerator prototype developed by ELICiT.



For more information on the project or to download the workshop presentations visit the ELICiT website.