Clean and efficient cooling in vaccine transportation using Rotating Magnetocaloric Effect

Introduction

Every year 1.5 million lives are lost worldwide due to insufficient access to vaccination. Paradoxically, over 50% of all produced vaccines are wasted, mostly due to ineffective temperature control during storage and transportation.

Challenges in Vaccine Cold Chain

The major challenges of the vaccine cold chain include:

1. Ever stricter limitations imposed on aerial transport due to the safety hazards of refrigerant gases.
2. High power demand of active refrigeration devices in last-mile deliveries where the electricity supply is unreliable.
3. Significant carbon footprint of high global warming potential (GWP) refrigerants.

Project Overview

The Magccine project aims to revolutionize the vaccine cold chain by developing a clean and efficient solid-state magnetic refrigerator based on a novel approach: the rotating magnetocaloric effect (RMCE). This is a recently (2023) patent-pending technology by project partners.

By reducing the amount of permanent magnets required, the RMCE is expected to enable drastic cuts in the device’s production cost, volume, and weight, while enhancing efficiency without the use of any high GWP or hazardous refrigerant gases. This highlights its role as a key enabling technology for tackling vaccine cold chain challenges.

Goals

Magccine's goal is to develop and optimize a fully operational prototype for vaccine refrigeration in the 2-8 ºC temperature range, which is required by most vaccines. This addresses the generation of clean cooling and clean cold chain transportation categories of this challenge.

Expertise and Collaboration

To this end, this project requires top-level expertise in:

• Magnetocaloric materials
• Magnetic field design
• Thermodynamic simulations
• Heat pumps

This expertise is perfectly matched by the complementary skills of the five academic institutions: U.Porto, CNRS, U. Seville, U.Aveiro, and U.Ljubljana, along with the two industrial partners: MagREEsource and Helium 3.

Advisory Board

Our endeavors will be guided by an experienced advisory board, including global key leaders such as:

• WHO
• UNICEF
• Cemafroid
• APIRAC
• IIR
• Medgree
• Addvolt