Landau–Lifshitz–Bloch simulations of the magnetocaloric effect in continuous ferromagnetic–paramagnetic transitions

Abstract

The usefulness of modeling magnetocaloric materials expands from the understanding of their behavior to the prediction of new materials, playing a fundamental role in the opti- mization of their performance. In contrast with other areas of magnetic materials research, micromagnetic simulations of magnetocaloric materials are scarce due to the difficulty of modeling the material in the vicinity of the transition. To solve this limitation, we propose to use the Landau–Lifshitz–Bloch micromagnetic simulations to study the mag- netocaloric effect associated with a second-order ferromagnetic↔paramagnetic transition. Following our proposed methodology and considering material parameters in a mean-field framework, we obtain reliable isothermal entropy change curves for monocrystalline and polycrystalline configurations, where we consider different anisotropic contributions. The robustness of the method was evaluated, yielding results that agreed with previous ex- perimental and theoretical observations. Our study shows that micromagnetic simulations are a powerful tool for analyzing second-order magnetocaloric materials with complex microstructures.