High-efficiency magnetic refrigeration using holmium

Noriki Terada () and Hiroaki Mamiya ()
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Noriki Terada: National Institute for Materials Science
Hiroaki Mamiya: National Institute for Materials Science

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-6

Abstract: Abstract Magnetic refrigeration (MR) is a method of cooling matter using a magnetic field. Traditionally, it has been studied for use in refrigeration near room temperature; however, recently MR research has also focused on a target temperature as low as 20 K for hydrogen liquefaction. Most research to date has employed high magnetic fields (at least 5 T) to obtain a large entropy change, which requires a superconducting magnet and, therefore, incurs a large energy cost. Here we propose an alternative highly efficient cooling technique in which small magnetic field changes, Δμ0H ≤ 0.4 T, can obtain a cooling efficiency of −ΔSM/Δμ0H = 32 J kg−1K−1T−1, which is one order of magnitude higher than what has been achieved using typical magnetocaloric materials. Our method uses holmium, which exhibits a steep magnetization change with varying temperature and magnetic field. The proposed technique can be implemented using permanent magnets, making it a suitable alternative to conventional gas compression–based cooling for hydrogen liquefaction.

Date: 2021
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21234-z

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