Screening of the synthesis route on the structural, magnetic and magnetocaloric properties of La0.6Ca0.2Ba0.2MnO3 manganite: A comparison between solid-solid state process and a combination polyol process and Spark Plasma Sintering

La0.6Ca0.2Ba0.2MnO3 ceramics are prepared by an original route, combining soft chemistry and Spark Plasma Sintering, within a few minutes at 700 °C and by the solid-state reaction at high temperatures with an annealing temperature of 1200 °C. We have studied the leverage of the powder synthesis method on the structural, morphological, magnetic and magnetocaloric properties of the samples. X-ray diffraction analysis using Rietveld refinement revealed that our materials crystallize in the rhombohedral system with R3¯c space group for the sample prepared by the Polyol-Spark Plasma Sintering method and in the orthorhombic structure with Pbnm space group for the sample synthesized by the solid-state reaction. Magnetization measurements versus temperature under magnetic applied field of 0.05 T show a paramagnetic-ferromagnetic phase transition for both samples. The Arrott plots reveal that ours materials undergo a second-order phase transition. The maximum values of the magnetic entropy change (−ΔSMmax) under the magnetic field change of 5 T are 2.4 and 4.7 J/kg K for La0.6Ca0.2Ba0.2MnO3 synthesized by using solid-state reaction and Polyol-Spark Plasma Sintering methods respectively. The highest value of the relative cooling power RCP is found to be 244 J/kg for the Polyol-Spark Plasma Sintering sample under 5 T. These results are interesting enough and suggest that the Polyol-Spark Plasma Sintering synthesis method is a feasible route to prepare high quality perovskite material for magnetic cooling application.