February 6, 2025

California Baptist University engineering students recently conducted a study on magnetic cooling and helped co-author an article accepted for publication in the proceedings of the Heat Transfer Conference.

The magnetic cooling study involved the potential of revolutionizing cooling systems. The idea is to heat and cool a magnetic material by exposing it to a changing magnetic field.

The students involved with the research were Lindsey Livoni, senior electrical engineering major, and Daniel Swann, Garrett Williams, Moriah Langley, Matthew Casillas and Rocky De Lyon, all senior mechanical engineering majors.

The process could theoretically be used to create refrigerators and other cooling technologies, but so far there are no commercially available products that use magnetic cooling.

The students spent time on an article summarizing literary findings, the design of the model and the results of the tests with the device. They researched past studies on the overall concept and on magnetic cooling systems. The article was accepted into a prestigious conference for professionals working in the field of heat transfer.

Langley said she is ecstatic that all of their hard work and time they all put in has paid off.

“We all have different strengths and one of the reasons we have been able to work together as a team so well is that we know each others’ strengths and are able to split up tasks accordingly,” Langley said. “Part of my job was being the budget manager, so I am in charge of ordering any parts we need for the prototype and keeping track of our expenses.”

Swann said he was able to help his team with designing the device, navigating the process for data acquisition and using the necessary programs to carry that out.

“When we came in, much of the research had already been done by last year’s team,” Swann said. “Our job was to complete the prototype they had designed, test it, compile results and then see if improvements could be made to the design of the device. The project was successful and I’m glad I had work published as an undergraduate.”

Last year’s team consisted of engineering students Paul Bartholomae, Joshua Flaherty, Bradley Goolsby, Trevor Logan, Nicholas Perhach and Jonathan Replogle, who conducted much of the preliminary research that was to be completed and finalized by this year’s iteration of the team.

The combined work of the two teams helped to further develop the studies on magnetic cooling and bring closure to a two-year-long project that took hundreds of hours and a dozen engineering students to finish.

“I’m very proud of my team and how we have worked together to achieve this goal,” Langley said. “It has been an amazing experience working with this team and I feel like we all learned a lot and are proud of what we accomplished.”

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