Effect of Al substitution on the magnetocaloric properties of La(Fe SiAl)

Here we study the influence of Al doping on the magnetization, heat capacity, and entropy change of La(FeSiAl ) where x = 0, 0.048, and 0.081. When x = 0, the system shows a remarkably sharp heat capacity feature associated with spin fluctuations coincident with, but quite distinct from the latent heat spike of the first order paramagnetic to ferromagnetic phase transition. With the addition of Al the magnetic and calorimetric features become more distributed in field, suggesting that Al adds disorder to the system. For both finite x compositions studied here, the latent heat disappears and the transition can be classified as second order. Although the entropy change associated with the transition is reduced once Al is substituted for Si, the adiabatic temperature change, ΔT is still significant. In La(Fe [Al) the balance between changes in the field dependence of the heat capacity with respect to overall ΔT gain is highlighted, showing that a small amount of Al doping clearly offers some advantage for application