Magnetocaloric effect in severe plastic deformed Gd-X (X=In, Ga, B, Y, Zr).

Nowadays,a bottleneck in designing an effective heat exchanger for magnetic refrigeration devices is the development of magnetocaloric materials exhibiting a good magnetocaloric effect in a wide temperature range suitable for utilization in active magnetic refrigeration (AMR) cycle. One of the best candidates is Gd solid solutions in which one can tune Curie temperature Tcby doping solvent element with a subsequent decreasing magnetocaloric effect.Solid solutions of Gd treated with the help of cold rolling in severe regime (relative deformation is about 60 times) show unusual magnetic properties initialized by induced magnetic anisotropy. Although magnetization, heat capacity, magnetocaloric effect aredepressed, they can be completely restored by a proper thermal treatment of the rolled specimens. It was shown that Gd-Y, Gd-In and Gd-Zrsolid solutions have comparable to pure Gd magnetocaloric effect in a wide temperature window up to 37K, 35K, and 16K, respectively, and therefore they can be useful for designing an effective AMR heat exchanger.