Catalysis for plastic deconstruction and upcycling

Electrocaloric (EC) refrigeration utilizes electric-field-induced polar entropy change and mechanical cycling of a dielectric material. While most of the active behaviors are electric-field driven, the required field is typically so high that it may cause undesired interference and increase the probability of electric breakdown. Here, we demonstrated a magnetic approach to modulating cooling devices where high-entropy-alloy (HEA) magnetic nanoparticles were adopted in an EC polymer to exploit the effect of the alloy-polymer interfaces on the dielectric and EC properties. We observed a substantially enhanced interfacial polarization in the nanocomposite. The interface-augmented EC composite exhibits a markedly increased entropy change of 55 Jkg −1 K −1 compared with the 23 Jkg −1 K −1 in the pristine polymer. The HEA nanocomposite can be mechanically driven by the magnetic field and thermally driven by the electric field, providing a decoupled driving strategy and additional degrees of freedom to construct an effective thermodynamic cooling cycle.