Thermomagnetic materials are a new type of magnetic energy materials, which enable the conversion of low temperature waste heat to electricity by three routes: Thermomagnetic motors, oscillators, and generators. Taking our recent work on thermomagnetic generators with different magnetic field topologies (TMG, Fig. 1 and 2) [1] as a starting point, in this talk we also analyse the material requirements for a more energy and economic efficient conversion. We present experiments of our TMG using different thermomagnetic materials (La-Fe-Si-Co with different transition temperatures and Gd). We compare the suitability of these materials and from this derive a generalized approach to evaluate the suitability of different thermomagnetic materials, which is different compared to magnetocaloric materials. We show that the thermodynamic efficiency of the best thermomagnetic materials outperforms thermoelectric materials when harvesting low temperature waste heat. Furthermore, the low raw materials cost results in a price per watt more than one order of magnitude lower than today’s power plants and thermoelectrics, which makes them also economically competitive. As summary, we present a materials library, which allows selecting the best available thermomagnetic materials in two Ashby plots as figures of merit and gives guidelines for future development of this material class [2]. At the end of this talk, approaches towards micro systems for harvesting low temperature waste heat are described.References: [1] A. Waske et al. Nature Energy 4, 68 (2019) [2] D. Dzekan et al, arXiv: 2001.03375 (2020)

Sebastian Fähler

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