High performance of low cost soft magnetic materials

The consistent interest in supporting research and development of magnetic materials during the last century is revealed in their steadily increasing market. In this work, the soft magnetic nanocrystalline FINEMET alloy was prepared with commercial purity raw materials and compared for the first time with the generally studied high purity one. The exhaustive characterization covers several diverse techniques: X-ray diffraction, Mossbauer spectroscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, differential thermal analysis and magnetic properties. In addition, a brief economic analysis is presented. For the alloys annealed at 813 K, the value of the grain size was 16 nm with 19·5% of Si, the coercivity was 0·30 A m−1 while the saturation was 1·2 T. These results prove that structural, magnetic and thermal properties of this material are very close to the expensive high purity FINEMET alloy, while a cost reduction of almost 98% seems highly attractive for laboratories and industry. The analysis should be useful not only for the production of FINEMETs, but for other type of systems with similar constitutive elements as well, including soft and hard magnetic materials.