Advances in Magnetocaloric Effect Materials

Dear Colleagues,

It is known that the magnetocaloric effect (MCE) is usually implemented in magnetic refrigeration, a promising method that enables us to fully suppress the harmful fluorinated refrigerants used by conventional systems. This cooling (heating) technique has also the advantage of presenting a potentially higher thermodynamic efficiency while covering a wide range of applications such as heat pumps, air-conditioning systems, domestic coolers, space industry, scientific instruments, and the liquefaction of gases. Additionally, the MCE could be used in many other applications, such as cancer treatment and drug delivery.

For the commercialization of MCE -based systems, it is necessary to develop affordable magnetocaloric materials with outstanding thermal effects that can be generated under low magnetic fields over a wide temperature range. In this way, multiferroic compounds combining several degrees of freedom are of great importance due to their potential ability to provide cooperative caloric effects. Moreover, the considered candidates must present additional practical properties such as long-term mechanical and chemical stabilities, negligible hysteresis, and safe constituent elements. On the other hand, a parallel effort must be dedicated to the design of competitive magnetocaloric devices with reduced cost and weight.

In the present Special Issue, we invite scientists and engineers to submit papers that discuss both fundamental and practical aspects of magnetocaloric/multicaloric materials as well as their implementation in functional devices.

The potential topics include but are not limited to:

- Magnetocaloric materials;

- Multicaloric effects in solid-state materials;

- Growth techniques for magnetocaloric materials;

- Magnetic cooling devices;

- AMR (active magnetic refrigeration) thermodynamic cycles;

- Corrosion phenomena, mechanical brittleness and hysteresis issues;

- Electronic structure and theoretical models;

- Anisotropic magnetocaloric effects.

Prof. Dr. Mohamed Balli
Prof. Dr. Daniel Fruchart
Guest Editor

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