Multicaloric materials and effects

Abstract

Multicaloric materials show thermal changes that can be driven simultaneously or sequentially by more than one type of external field. The use of more than one driving field can induce larger thermal changes, with smaller field magnitudes, over wider ranges of operating temperature, and can also eliminate hysteresis in one control parameter by transferring it to another. The thermodynamics behind multicaloric effects is well established, but only a small number of multicaloric materials have been experimentally studied to date. Here, we describe the fundamentals of multicaloric effects and discuss the performance of representative multicaloric materials. Exploiting multicaloric effects could aid the future development of cooling devices, where key challenges include energy efficiency and the span of the operating temperature.