Magnetocaloric effects and materials
Magnetic refrigeration from working principles towards applications

In this chapter, we introduce the magnetocaloric effect through a thermodynamic description. Next, methods for characterizing the parameters describing a magnetocaloric material are briefly introduced. Finally, we review the state of the art of materials available on an industrial or laboratory scale, comparing two key parameters ΔS _iso and ΔT _adia for field variations around 1 Tesla.