A new study published in Scientific Reports by scientists at Rochester Institute of Technology investigates a metal alloy system that could lead to commercially viable magnetic refrigerants and environmentally friendly cooling technologies.
“The materials use magnetic fields to change a refrigerant’s temperature without the coolant gases associated with global warming. The thermodynamic phenomenon, called “magnetocaloric effect,” makes magnetic refrigeration an environmentally friendly and efficient alternative to current cooling technologies,” according to Phys.org.
“We created alloys containing four and five different elements whose properties helped our theory collaborators develop a calculation that predicts the magnetic properties of a larger set of compounds that have not yet been synthesized. Now we have identified hundreds of new alloy combinations that could be useful,” Casey Miller, head of RIT’s materials science and engineering program, added.
