Magnetocaloric refrigeration near room temperature (invited)

Modern society relies on readily available refrigeration. The ideal cooling machine would be a compact, solid state, silent and energy efficient heat pump that does not require maintenance. Magnetic refrigeration has three prominent advantages compared to compressor-based refrigeration. First, there are no harmful gases involved, second it may be built more compact as the working material is a solid and third magnetic refrigerators generate much less noise. Recently, a new class of magnetic refrigerant materials for room-temperature applications was discovered. These new materials have important advantages over existing magnetic coolants: They exhibit a large magnetocaloric effect (MCE) in conjunction with a magnetic phase transition of first order. This MCE is, larger than that of Gd metal, which is used in the demonstration refrigerators built to explore the potential of this evolving technology. In the present review, we compare the different materials considering both scientific aspects and industrial applicability. (C) 2006 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.