Enhanced Magnetic Cooling through Optimising Local Interactions

Completed

Energy Efficiency(Residential and commercial)
Energy Efficiency(Industry)

Basic and strategic applied research

PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND MATHEMATICS (Chemistry)
PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND MATHEMATICS (Physics)
PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND MATHEMATICS (Metallurgy and Materials)

Not Cross-cutting

Professor FM Grosche
Physics
University of Cambridge

Standard

EPSRC

31 August 2020

30 August 2023

36 months

£88,922

Supercond; magn. &quant.fluids

East of England

NC : Physical Sciences

Professor FM Grosche, Physics, University of Cambridge

Refrigeration is central to modern society by making hot climates habitable, preserving food, and facilitating medical scanners and quantum computing. Over a tenth of Britain's electricity is estimated to go to cooling, at a cost of over 5 billion a year, with nearly 12 million (m) people globally employed in refrigeration related industries. Cryogenic refrigeration, which provides temperatures close to absolute zero, is becoming a major industry; the research council STFC have predicted that contributions to the UK economy from cryogenic refrigeration will increase from 324m to 3300m in the decade to 2025. Solid state cooling based on caloric materials promises higher energy efficiencies than current technologies based on fluid refrigerants and do not suffer from inevitable escape of their active components as gases, such as scarce liquid helium used for cryogenic applications. Caloric refrigerants rely on a change in entropy, a measure of the universe's tendency to disorder, in response to external stimuli such as applied magnetic and electric fields or pressure. Practical caloric cooling requires new materials that exhibit the maximum change in their entropy for readily achievable external stimuli. In magnetocalorics, the cooling process is driven by applied magnetic fields. This has advantages, including high cyclability compared to other calorics as materials do not tend to deteriorate when exposed to magnetic fields. Magnetocalorics have been known for over a century, but their use has mostly been restricted to refrigeration at ultra-low temperatures, measured in milli-kelvins, and with very large magnetic fields, limiting their application. Developing magnetocalorics that work at higher temperatures and under lower magnetic fields will enable magnetisation based cryogenic cooling to be more used much more widely.

13/08/25