Designing magnetocaloric materials for hydrogen liquefaction with light rare-earth Laves phases

Abstract Magnetocaloric hydrogen liquefaction could be a ‘game-changer’ for liquid industry. Although heavy rare-earth based magnetocaloric materials show strong effects in the temperature range required by (77–20 K), high resource criticality of elements is major obstacle upscaling this emerging technology. In contrast, higher abundances light make their alloys highly appealing liquefaction. Via mean-field approach, it demonstrated that tuning Curie ( T C ) an idealized material towards lower cryogenic temperatures leads to larger maximum magnetic and adiabatic changes (Δ S Δ ad ). Especially vicinity condensation point (20 optimized are predicted significantly large values. Following approach taking chemical physical similarities into consideration, method designing intermetallic compounds used: alloy 20 K mixing with different de Gennes factors. By Nd Pr Laves phase (Nd, Pr)Al 2 , Ce (Pr, Ce)Al fully series covering developed, demonstrating competitive effect compared compound DyAl .