New Acta Materialia publication: Exploring hydrogen sorption in DyCo2 Laves-phase for magnetocaloric hydrogen liquefaction.
2026/09/23
A recent study conducted in collaboration between the Functional Materials group at TU Darmstadt and the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Japan investigated tuning the magnetocaloric properties of the heavy rare-earth-based Laves-phase through reversible hydrogen sorption for hydrogen liquefaction applications.
Complete hydrogenation successfully shifted the Curie temperature down from 139 K to 24 K, placing the material within the target temperature range for hydrogen liquefaction, while partial hydrogenation revealed a core-shell microstructure with two distinct phase transitions. Although thermal desorption successfully recovered the original transiiton temperature, microstructural analyses showed that crystallographic defects such as stacking faults and grain refinement led to a reduction in the material's peak magnetocaloric performance.
You can read the full open-access article in Acta Materialia here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actamat.2026.122775
A. M. Döring, B. Beckmann, F. Maccari, W. Liu, A. Aubert, L. Schäfer, X. Tang, Z. Wang, H. Sepehri-Amin, O. Gutfleisch, K. Skokov
Hydrogen sorption-induced tuning of magnetocaloric properties of heavy rare-earth-based Laves-phase DyCo2 for hydrogen liquefaction
Acta Materialia 321 (2026).
DOI: 10.1016/j.actamat.2026.122775
