A procedure to extract the magnetocaloric parameters of the single phases from experimental data of a multiphase system.

Abstract

In this work, we propose a method to extract the individual parameters that describe the field dependence of magnetic entropy change of each phase in a multiphase system. This method makes use of the scaling laws of the magnetocaloric effect and can help us to determine the behavior of individual phases and to predict their critical exponents. The accuracy of the procedure is illustrated applying it to ball milled powders, in which an amorphous phase with T C around room temperature coexists with bcc-Fe type crystallites. The obtained values are in good agreement with those reported in the literature for single phase systems. The proposed method could be applied to other systems where single phase materials cannot be easily obtained in order to characterize the effect of impurities.