Magnetic refrigeration at room temperature is of great potential for the new generation of refrigeration technology. The performance of the active magnetic regenerator is greatly influenced by many design and operation parameters. In this paper, a one-dimensional numerical model for active magnetic regenerator is presented and validated. The performances of active magnetic regenerator with different particle diameters, utilization factors and operating frequencies are calculated with the present model. The performance curves of utilization factor with different particle diameters are presented and analysed. The results indicate that the cooling power and COP both increase at first and then decrease with the increase of the utilization factor. And the deviation between the optimal utilization factor of cooling power and COP becomes larger with decrease of the particle diameter. Comprehensively, the optimal range of particle diameter is 0.4-0.6 mm with the utilization factor of 0.7-1.5 which also depends on the operating frequency based on the present data.
