A universal metric for ferroic energy materials

Ekkes Brück*, Hargen Yibole, Lian Zhang

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

26 Citations (Scopus)
70 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

After almost 20 years of intensive research on magnetocaloric effects near room temperature, magnetic refrigeration with first-order magnetocaloric materials has come close to real-life applications. Many materials have been discussed as potential candidates to be used in multicaloric devices. However, phase transitions in ferroic materials are often hysteretic and a metric is needed to estimate the detrimental effects of this hysteresis. We propose the coefficient of refrigerant performance, which compares the net work in a reversible cycle with the positive work on the refrigerant, as a universal metric for ferroic materials. Here, we concentrate on examples from magnetocaloric materials and only consider one barocaloric experiment. This is mainly due to lack of data on electrocaloric materials. It appears that adjusting the field-induced transitions and the hysteresis effects can minimize the losses in first-order materials. This article is part of the themed issue 'Taking the temperature of phase transitions in cool materials'.

Original languageEnglish
Article number20150303
Number of pages6
JournalRoyal Society of London. Philosophical Transactions A. Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
Volume374
Issue number2074
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 13 Aug 2016

Keywords

  • Coefficient of refrigerant performance
  • Fe2P
  • Magnetocaloric
  • Reversible cycle

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'A universal metric for ferroic energy materials'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this