Multicaloric Cryocooling Using Heavy Rare-Earth Free La(Fe,Si)13-Based Compounds.

The transition toward a carbon-neutral society based on renewable energies goes hand in hand with the availability of energy-efficient technologies. Magnetocaloric cooling is a very promising refrigeration technology to fulfill this role regarding cryogenic gas liquefaction. However, the current reliance on highly resource critical, heavy rare-earth-based compounds as magnetocaloric material makes global usage unsustainable. Here, we aim to mitigate this limitation through the utilization of a multicaloric cooling concept, which uses the external stimuli of isotropic pressure and magnetic field to tailor and induce magnetostructural phase transitions associated with large caloric effects. In this study, La0.7Ce0.3Fe11.6Si1.4 is used as a nontoxic, low-cost, low-criticality multiferroic material to explore the potential, challenges, and peculiarities of multicaloric cryocooling, achieving maximum isothermal entropy changes up to -28 J (kg K)-1 in the temperature range from 190 K down to 30 K. Thus, the multicaloric cooling approach offers an additional degree of freedom to tailor the phase transition properties and may lead to energy-efficient and environmentally friendly gas liquefaction based on designed-for-purpose, noncritical multiferroic materials.

High-Throughput Design of Magnetocaloric Materials for Energy Applications: MM´X alloys.

Magnetic refrigeration offers an energy efficient and environmental friendly alternative to conventional vapor-cooling. However, its adoption depends on materials with tailored magnetic and structural properties. Here a high-throughput computational workflow for the design of magnetocaloric materials is introduced. Density functional theory calculations are used to screen potential candidates in the family of MM'X (M/M' = metal, X = main group element) compounds. Out of 274 stable compositions, 46 magnetic compounds are found to stabilize in both an austenite and martensite phase. Following the concept of Curie temperature window, nine compounds are identified as potential candidates with structural transitions, by evaluating and comparing the structural phase transition and magnetic ordering temperatures. Additionally, the use of doping to tailor magnetostructural coupling for both known and newly predicted MM'X compounds is predicted and isostructural substitution as a general approach to engineer magnetocaloric materials is suggested.

Tailoring Negative Thermal Expansion via Tunable Induced Strain in La-Fe-Si-Based Multifunctional Material.

Zero thermal expansion (ZTE) composites are typically designed by combining positive thermal expansion (PTE) with negative thermal expansion (NTE) materials acting as compensators and have many diverse applications, including in high-precision instrumentation and biomedical devices. La(Fe1-x,Six)13-based compounds display several remarkable properties, such as giant magnetocaloric effect and very large NTE at room temperature. Both are linked via strong magnetovolume coupling, which leads to sharp magnetic and volume changes occurring simultaneously across first-order phase transitions; the abrupt nature of these changes makes them unsuitable as thermal expansion compensators. To make these materials more useful practically, the mechanisms controlling the temperature over which this transition occurs and the magnitude of contraction need to be controlled. In this work, ball-milling was used to decrease particles and crystallite sizes and increase the strain in LaFe11.9Mn0.27Si1.29Hx alloys. Such size and strain tuning effectively broadened the temperature over which this transition occurs. The material's NTE operational temperature window was expanded, and its peak was suppressed by up to 85%. This work demonstrates that induced strain is the key mechanism controlling these materials' phase transitions. This allows the optimization of their thermal expansion toward room-temperature ZTE applications.

A multicaloric cooling cycle that exploits thermal hysteresis.

The giant magnetocaloric effect, in which large thermal changes are induced in a material on the application of a magnetic field, can be used for refrigeration applications, such as the cooling of systems from a small to a relatively large scale. However, commercial uptake is limited. We propose an approach to magnetic cooling that rejects the conventional idea that the hysteresis inherent in magnetostructural phase-change materials must be minimized to maximize the reversible magnetocaloric effect. Instead, we introduce a second stimulus, uniaxial stress, so that we can exploit the hysteresis. This allows us to lock-in the ferromagnetic phase as the magnetizing field is removed, which drastically removes the volume of the magnetic field source and so reduces the amount of expensive Nd-Fe-B permanent magnets needed for a magnetic refrigerator. In addition, the mass ratio between the magnetocaloric material and the permanent magnet can be increased, which allows scaling of the cooling power of a device simply by increasing the refrigerant body. The technical feasibility of this hysteresis-positive approach is demonstrated using Ni-Mn-In Heusler alloys. Our study could lead to an enhanced usage of the giant magnetocaloric effect in commercial applications.