The transition toward a carbon-neutral society based on renewable energies goes hand in hand with the availability of energy-efficient technologies. In our new publication in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, we utilize a multicaloric cooling concept, which uses the external stimuli of isotropic pressure and magnetic field to tailor and induce magnetostructural phase transitions, respectively. We use La_0.7Ce_0.3Fe_11.6Si_1.4 as a nontoxic, low-cost, low-criticality multiferroic material to explore the potential, challenges, and peculiarities of multicaloric cryocooling, achieving maximum isothermal entropy changes up to −28 J (kg K)−1 in the temperature range from 190 K down to 30 K. The multicaloric cooling approach offers an additional degree of freedom to tailor the phase transition properties of designed-for-purpose, noncritical multiferroic materials for gas liquefaction applications.

B. Beckmann, L. Pfeuffer, J. Lill, B. Eggert, D. Koch, B. Lavina, J. Zhao, T. Toellner, E. E. Alp, K. Ollefs, K. P. Skokov, H. Wende, O. Gutfleisch
ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces (2024).
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.4c05397