A conversation with Bowei Huang, Cofounder and Director of Product at Magneto, on magnetic cooling, rare-earth-free materials and the road to commercial pilots.
Question: Let’s start with the big picture. Magneto is developing a very different approach to heating and cooling. Why is it time to rethink the systems we rely on today?
Bowei: Heating and cooling are everywhere: in homes, supermarkets, industry, laboratories and increasingly in data-computing-driven infrastructure. But most systems still rely on vapour-compression technology and more conventional cooling methods, such as evaporative cooling towers. That creates two problems at once: high electricity uses and climate impacts, like huge water demand, not to mention secondary impacts such as global warming and PFAS residues. We saw an opportunity to rethink the core of the system, not just improve the old one. Magneto is developing magnetocaloric heat exchangers that enable efficient cooling and heating with significantly higher energy efficiency and without harmful refrigerants.
Question: The magnetocaloric effect has been discovered for decades. What makes it ready for real-world applications now?
Bowei: Yes, magnetocaloric cooling has been researched for decades, but turning the technology into a commercial product has always been difficult. The challenge has not only been the physics; it has also involved the materials, the geometry, the manufacturing route, and the engineering. Earlier approaches often depended on rare-earth materials such as gadolinium, which are useful as benchmarks but difficult to scale cost-effectively. What has changed is that Magneto combines a rare-earth-free material with 3D-printing technology, allowing us to move magnetocaloric technology from a scientific phenomenon toward a scalable industry.
Question: For people who are not deep in the technology, what happens inside a magnetocaloric heat exchanger?
Bowei: The material heats up when it enters a magnetic field and cools down when the magnetic field is removed. We use that effect in a controlled cycle and transfer heat with a low-impact heat-transfer fluid. In practice, this means we can generate useful hot and cold flows without using a conventional refrigerant cycle. The active heat exchanger is the heart of that process.
Question: You often compare the material with gadolinium. Why is being “as good as Gd” such an important point?
Bowei: Gadolinium has long been seen as a reference material for magnetocaloric cooling, especially around room temperature, where many refrigerator prototypes have been developed and have demonstrated advantages over vapor-compression systems of a similar scale. But a good commercial material must do more than perform well in the lab. It needs to be available, affordable, stable, safe and manufacturable. Our Mn-Fe-P-Si material is designed to deliver strong magnetocaloric performance without relying on rare earths. That is why the comparison matters: we are aiming for the performance people associate with Gd, but with a material platform that makes more sense for scale. TU Delft has also described Magneto’s material as transferring heat equally well as materials containing rare-earth metals, while using abundant elements such as manganese, iron, phosphorus and silicon.
Question: What role does 3D printing play? Is it mainly a production method, or is it part of the performance?
Bowei: First of all, the shaping process for magnetocaloric materials itself is a hurdle on the path to the widespread application of magnetocaloric technology. Processing a magnetocaloric material with specific properties into a desired shape, without changing those original properties, is much more difficult than it sounds.
Second, the shape contributes directly into the performance. In magnetocaloric systems, geometry matters a lot. The material must exchange heat efficiently with the fluid while keeping pressure drop and pumping energy low. With 3D printing, we can shape Mn-Fe-P-Si powders into optimized heat-exchanger structures that are tailor-made for our customers. They do not have to deal with the material themselves or compromise with conventional geometries. As a result, we can create structures that transfer heat efficiently with different heat-transfer fluids, while also keeping pressure drop and pumping energy low.
Question: What has made magnetocaloric technology ready to move from research into real applications?
Bowei: We are here because several things have finally come together. The market need is urgent: cooling demand is rising, energy efficiency matters more, and refrigerant regulation is pushing the industry to look for alternatives. At the same time, the material science has matured, and additive manufacturing gives us a way to make useful heat-exchanger shapes. So, Magneto is no longer only proving that the effect exists. We are proving that it can become a scalable component for real cooling and heating systems.
Question: What are you focused on right now?
Bowei: Our focus right now is validation and scale-up. We have two parallel pipelines in-house. On one side, we are doing in-depth R&D to improve the material properties, mechanical robustness, and heat-exchanger design. On the other side, we are scaling up material production to meet the growing demand from customer projects.
Question: What should people remember about Magneto?
Bowei: That we are not trying to make a slightly better conventional heat pump. We are fundamentally changing the thermal management system: magnetic-based, gas-free, more efficient, and more durable. The reason we are where we are is simple: the industry is calling for a new solution, and our technology is ready to provide it.
