Novel Bimorphological Anisotropic Bulk Nanocomposite Materials with High Energy Products

XH Li and L Lou and WP Song and GW Huang and FC Hou and Q Zhang and HT Zhang and JW Xiao and B Wen and XY Zhang, ADVANCED MATERIALS, 29, 1606430 (2017).

DOI: 10.1002/adma.201606430

Nanostructuring of magnetically hard and soft materials is fascinating for exploring next-generation ultrastrong permanent magnets with less expensive rare-earth elements. However, the resulting hard/soft nanocomposites often exhibit random crystallographic orientations and monomorphological equiaxed grains, leading to inferior magnetic performances compared to corresponding pure rare-earth magnets. This study describes the first fabrication of a novel bimorphological anisotropic bulk nanocomposite using a multistep deformation approach, which consists of oriented hard-phase SmCo rod-shaped grains and soft- phase Fe(Co) equiaxed grains with a high fraction (approximate to 28 wt%) and small size (approximate to 10 nm). The nanocomposite exhibits a record-high energy product (28 MGOe) for this class of bulk materials with less rare-earth elements and outperforms, for the first time, the corresponding pure rare-earth magnet with 58% enhancement in energy product. These findings open up the door to moving from a pure permanent-magnet system to a stronger nanocomposite system at lower costs.

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