Thermal energy harvesting with magnetocalorics

International audience ; Cutting greenhouse emissions, and improving the global energy efficiency have been themain goals of researches in the field of caloric materials for more than two decades now (1).So far, the research of new solid state cooling devices, using magnetocalorics (MC) as re-frigerant, has been primarily focused on achieving better efficiency (2). Recently, a growingattention to other energy conversion applications with some emphasis on the micro and nanoscales has triggered a paradigm shift towards energy harvesting (3). Here, we shall brieflyreview the main scientific, and technological challenges entailed by switching from cooling tothermo-magnetic generation (TMG) focusing on the modeling tools used to study the effi-ciency/power trade-of. Some recent results obtained using Gd films as the active substancein a TMG, microscale device will be presented (4).and present some recently developed TMG prototypes and their properties.(1) X. Moya, S. Kar-Narayan, and D. Mathur Neil, Caloric Materials Near Ferroic PhaseTransitions, Nat. Mater. 13, 439 (2014).(2) J. Lyubina, Magnetocaloric materials for energy efficient cooling, J. Phys. D: Appl.Phys. 50, 053002 (2017)(3) A. Kitanovski, Energy applications of magnetocaloric materials, Adv. Energy Mater.10, 1903741 (2020)(4) ) D. Nguyen Ba, Y. Zheng, L. Becerra, m. marangolo, M. Almanza, and M. LoBue, Mag-netocaloric Effect in Flexible, Free-Standing Gadolinium Thick Films for Energy ConversionApplications, Physical Review Applied 15, (2021)