Aiming to decrease the necessity/use of critical rare-earth elements (e.g. Nd, Dy and Tb) and to plug the magnetic property gap between the low performance ferrites and the high performance Nd-Fe-B, the Functional Materials group conducts research in promising materials systems which fulfil these requirements. Among these candidates, we highlight our research on Mn-based (Mn-Al, Mn-Bi and Mn-Ga) and Fe-Sn material systems.
The experimental investigations embrace intrinsic and extrinsic magnetic properties, from single crystals to bulk polycrystalline samples. Different processing routes and characterization methods are adopted to optimize and to understand the correlation between microstructure and magnetic properties for these permanent magnets candidates. New compounds and new materials systems are constantly investigated through a combination of joint works with theoreticians and different high throughput techniques.
[1] K.P. Skokov and O. Gutfleisch, Heavy rare earth free, free rare earth and rare earth free magnets – Vision and reality, Scr. Mater. 154 (2018) 289.
DOI: 10.1016/j.scriptamat.2018.01.032
[2] B. Fayyazi, K. P. Skokov, T. Faske, et al., Experimental and computational analysis of binary Fe-Sn ferromagnetic compounds, Acta Mater. 180 (2019) 126
DOI: 10.1016/j.actamat.2019.08.054
[3] S. Ener, J. Kroder, K. P. Skokov and O. Gutfleisch, The search for room temperature tetragonal phases of Fe-Mn-Ga: A reactive crucible melting approach, J Alloy Compd. 683 (2016) 198
DOI: 10.1016/j.jallcom.2016.05.069
[4] S. Ener, E. Anagnostopoulou, I. Dirba, et al., Consolidation of cobalt nanorods: A new route for rare-earth free nanostructured permanent magnets, Acta Mater. 145 (2018) 290
DOI: 10.1016/j.actamat.2017.12.009
[4] Y. Chen, S. Sawatzki, S. Ener, et al., On the synthesis and microstructure analysis of high performance MnBi, AIP Adv. 6 (2017) 125301
DOI: 10.1063/1.4971759
