Magnetic properties and magnetocaloric effect in Ni–Mn–Sn alloys
Introduction
Ni–Mn–Sn Heusler alloys have been attracting a lot of scientists by virtue of their giant magnetocaloric effect (GMCE) and application potential for magnetic refrigeration at room temperature [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]. Both the positive (inverse) and negative (normal) GMCEs could be observed in these alloys by changing composition and fabrication conditions. The positive GMCE is believed to relate to a transformation between martensite and austenite phases. The coexistence of ferromagnetic (FM) and antiferromagnetic (AFM) orders was also observed in the alloys. Adding other elements such as Cu, Co, Al etc. [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16] and changing fabrication conditions [17], [18], [19], [20] are common ways to understand the magnetic mechanism and achieve the desired GMCEs for the alloys. The magnetic orders and the magnetocaloric effects in Ni–Mn–Si alloys were found to be very sensitive to their composition and fabrication conditions. Therefore, systematic studies on these alloys are still needed. The compositions of the alloys in most of published papers are rather limited. In this work, we investigated magnetic and magnetocaloric properties in the Ni50Mn50−xSnx alloys with a wide range of the Sn-concentration (x=0–40) to make more clear the variation trend versus composition of magnetic and magnetocaloric properties of the material.
Section snippets
Experiment
Alloys with nominal compositions of Ni50Mn50−xSnx (x=0, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 30 and 40) were prepared from pure metals (4 N) of Ni, Mn and Sn by using an arc-melting method. A part of each sample was annealed at 850 °C for 4 h in a vacuum of 10−5 Torr and then quenched to room temperature by Ar-flow. The quenching rate was about 100 °C per minute. The structure of the samples was examined by means of powder X-ray diffraction (XRD) on a Siemens D5000 X-Ray diffractometer with
Results and discussion
Fig. 1 shows room temperature powder-XRD patterns of the as-melted and annealed Ni0.5Mn0.5−xSnx alloys in the range of 30–65°. Crystalline phases of Ni2MnSn, NiMn, Ni3Sn2, Mn3Sn and MnSn2 are identified from these patterns. The number and relative intensity of diffraction peaks, i.e. crystalline structure, are varied with varying the Sn-concentration (x) for both the as-melted and annealed cases. The Mn3Sn phase is a main phase with low values of x, while the Ni3Sn2 phase is dominated at high
Conclusion
The Ni50Mn50−xSnx alloys with a wide range of Sn-concentration (x=0–40) were fabricated by arc-melting and subsequently annealing. The influence of composition and fabrication conditions on structure, magnetic properties and magnetocaloric effect was investigated systematically. The formation of crystalline phases of Ni2MnSn, NiMn, Ni3Sn2, Mn3Sn, MnSn2 was observed. The coexistence of various magnetic orders was revealed by both the magnetic hysteresis and thermomagnetization measurements. The
Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED) of Vietnam under Grant numbers of 103.02–2011.23 and 103.02–2010.28 and the Converging Research Center Program funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, Korea (2014048835). A part of the work was done in the Key Laboratory for Electronic Materials and Devices, and Laboratory of Magnetism and Superconductivity, Institute of Materials Science, VAST, Vietnam.
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2023, Journal of Physics and Chemistry of SolidsCitation Excerpt :Fig. 2(a) shows the temperature dependence of the magnetization M of Ni2Mn1.48Sn0.52 measured in an applied field of 1 kOe after a zero-field cooling (ZFC) and a field-cooling (FC) process. The overall behavior of the temperature variation of M, M(T), is consistent with previous results [8,10,15,22,23]. In the ZFC process, the sample was first cooled to 1.8 K from room temperature under zero magnetic field; at this temperature the magnetic field of 1 kOe was applied and the magnetization was measured at this constant field with increasing temperature up to 400 K. Then, without removing the external field, the magnetization was measured with decreasing temperature, i.e., the FC process.