Events

Seminar of International Laboratory of High Magnetic Fields and Low Temperatures PAS

Characterisation of Magnetocaloric Materials

G. Porcari

Department of Physics and Earth Sciences, University of Parma, Parma, Italy

Research on magnetocaloric materials pushes forward the development of a new generation of more efficient and environmentally friendly refrigerators. The success of this new technology is tightly bound with the ability of producing materials presenting a highly reversible magnetocaloric effect (MCE), good mechanical stability and tunable thermal conductivity. [1]

Efficient devices will operate thermomagnetic cycles at high frequencies thus requiring systems capable of sustaining, within their expected lifetime, up to 1 billion magnetization-demagnetization branches.

The achievement of these objectives requires still a huge effort concerning both materials preparation and properties characterisation [2,3,4]: my activity deals mainly with the study of this second aspect.

In this seminar I will explain the aim behind the realization of the experimental setups I built in Parma and Delft, as well as with my ideas for the future.

In particular I think that some of the next steps to overcome the present state of art may concern the development of direct temperature change probes for low dimensionality systems, a magnetocaloric characterisation getting closer to service conditions of real devices and the study of the materials’ dynamic response.

These metrological activities will be instrumental to bridge materials science and devices engineering.

[1] J. Lyubina et al. J. Appl. Phys. 109 (2011) 07A902.
[2] J. Lyubina et al. Adv. Mater. 22 (2010) 3735.
[3] K. G. Sandeman, Gas-free refrigeration, In Magnetics Technology International, 30-32 (2011).
[4] K. G. Sandeman, Magnetic measurement standardization, In Magnetics Technology International, 72-78 (2014).