Sustainable Alloy Design: Rare Earth Materials Challenge

This proposed project is to develop a novel class of high-temperature, high-energy-product permanent magnets with minimized rare-earth element based on a two-phase (Sm2Fe17N3)1-x(Co35Fe65)x (0<x<0.8). The resultant two-phase magnetic materials, which can be fabricated by a cost-effective, scalable process, are expected to achieve the energy product of 30MGOe at high temperature up to 450oC over 100 MGOe at room temperature. Research and development of these two phase nanocomposite permanent magnet materials will be proceeded as follows: (1) A low-cost chemical approach that can control at the atomic scale using a crystal chemistry will be applied for synthesizing high saturation soft Co35Fe65 nanoparticles, ( 2) A low-cost modified reduction-diffusion process will be used as a processing technique for producing highly coercive, Sm2Fe17N3 nanostructured powders (nanoparticles), and (3) A rapid hot press (RHP) or hot isostatic press (HIP) will be used to produce bulk nanocomposite magnet comprised of soft high moment Co35Fe65 nanoparticles inclusion in an aligned hard matrix Sm2Fe17N3. The Phase I project will focus on the feasibility study of the proposed concept, identifying the key technical issues including material design (composition and microstructure) and processing procedures that control the performance of this class of high-temperature, high-energy-product, and less-rare-earth magnetic materials.