Advanced materials for magnetic cooling:fundamentals and practical aspects

TL;DR

This review discusses recent advances in magnetocaloric materials, focusing on their fundamental properties, thermodynamic performance in devices, practical challenges, and innovative concepts like multilayered systems for magnetic cooling.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of magnetocaloric materials including their practical applicability, stability, synthesis, and introduces new concepts such as rotating effects and multilayered systems.

Findings

Identification of key material families for magnetic cooling

Analysis of practical challenges in scaling up magnetocaloric materials

Introduction of innovative concepts like rotating magnetocaloric effect

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the research activities on magnetocalorics have been exponentially increased leading to the discovery of a wide category of materials including intermetallics and oxides. Even though the reported materials were found to show excellent magnetocaloric properties on laboratory scale, only a restricted family among them could be upscaled toward industrial levels and implemented as refrigerants in magnetic cooling devices. On the other hand, in the most of reported reviews, the magnetocaloric materials are usually discussed in terms of their adiabatic temperature and entropy changes, which is not enough to get more insight about their large scale applicability. In this review, not only the fundamental properties of recently reported magnetocaloric materials are discussed but also their thermodynamic performance in functional devices. The reviewed families particularly include Gd1-xRx alloys, LaFe13-xSix, MnFeP1-xAsx and R1-xAxMnO3 based compounds. Other relevant practical aspects such as mechanical stability, synthesis and corrosion issues are discussed. In addition, the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters that play a crucial role in the control of magnetic and magnetocaloric properties are regarded. In order to reproduce the needed magnetocaloric parameters, some practical models are proposed. Finally, the concepts of the rotating magnetocaloric effect and multilayered magnetocalorics are introduced.