NIMS:the highest performance magnetic refrigeration material: High efficiency of hydrogen liquefaction

NIMS:the highest performance magnetic refrigeration material: High efficiency of hydrogen liquefaction

-Advancing to high efficiency of hydrogen liquefaction, which is essential for realizing hydrogen society-

NIMS:

Using machine learning, we discovered the world’s highest performance magnetic refrigeration material for hydrogen liquefaction.

This is expected to reduce the cost of producing liquefied hydrogen, which has been a major obstacle to the realization of a hydrogen society.

https://www.jst.go.jp/pr/announce/20200512/pdf/20200512.pdf

Machine-learning-guided discovery of the gigantic magnetocaloric effect in HoB2 near the hydrogen liquefaction temperature

Pedro Baptista de Castro, Kensei Terashima, […]Yoshihiko Takano

Published: 12 May 2020

NPG Asia Materials volume 12,

Article number: 35 (2020) Cite this article

Abstract

Magnetic refrigeration exploits the magnetocaloric effect,

which is the entropy change upon the application and removal of magnetic fields in materials, providing an alternate path for refrigeration other than conventional gas cycles.

While intensive research

has uncovered a vast number of magnetic materials that exhibit a large magnetocaloric effect, these properties remain unknown for a substantial number of compounds.

To explore new functional materials in this unknown space, machine learning is used as a guide for selecting materials

that could exhibit a large magnetocaloric effect.

By this approach,

  1. HoB2 is singled out and synthesized, and
  2. its magnetocaloric properties are evaluated,

leading to the experimental discovery of a gigantic magnetic entropy change of 40.1 J kg−1 K−1 (0.35 J cm−3 K−1) for a field change of 5 T in the vicinity of a ferromagnetic second-order phase transition with a Curie temperature of 15 K.

This is the highest value reported so far,

to the best of our knowledge, near the hydrogen liquefaction temperature;

thus, HoB2 is a highly suitable material for hydrogen liquefaction and low-temperature magnetic cooling applications.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41427-020-0214-y