Where there is intellectual capital, academic capacity, and economic and environmental drivers… there will be the will and the way. And the magnet sector and its growing number of applications are not immune.

In an article posted last week by Tracey Bryant of the University of Deleware (‘UD’) announced that UD “has been awarded a $4.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's ('DOE') Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) to lead a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research project to develop the next generation of high-performance permanent magnets.”

As many of us in the rare earth space are aware, stronger magnets are the enablers of the green energy economy and are the cornerstones upon which the development of energy efficient hybrid/electric vehicles, wind turbines, new energy storage systems and healthcare (e.g. MRIs) are being made possible.

Bryant reported that Dr. Hadjipanayis, the chairperson of the Department of Physics at UD will be the principal investigator on the project, and that will coordinate a team of chemists, material scientists, physicists, and engineers from several universities (Delaware, Nebraska, Northeastern, and Virginia Commonwealth), the DOE’s Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University and US magnet maker Electron Energy Corporation.

The strongest permanent magnets today are neodymium (Nd)- iron (Fe)- boron (B) magnets and as Bryant also reports, “Dr. Hadjipanayis was one of the three researchers who discovered the Neo magnet in the early 1980s. In the new project, he and his team will be working to identify new materials that will result in magnets twice as strong as those currently in existence.”

A number of forecasters report that the demand for Neo-magnets is growing at about 15 percent per year, and while according to experts such as Australia’s Dudley Kingsnorth, the supply/demand will be in balance -- although quite tight.

Bryant notes “ The UD-led team will explore three different routes over the three-year project. The first route will be to discover new materials in tertiary rare earth-transition metal-element X systems that have not yet been explored due to synthesis difficulties such as vapor pressure, high reactivity, toxicity, or their refractory nature. The second route will be to develop materials that are free of rare earth metals and stabilized by the addition of small non-magnetic atoms (Fe-Co-X); and the third route will be to use the bottom-up approach to develop high-energy nanocomposite materials consisting of a uniform and nanoscale mixture of high anisotropy hard (Nd-Fe-B) and high magnetization soft (Fe) magnetic phases.

As Dr. Hadjipanayis is reported to have said… “We hope our efforts will provide the fundamental innovations and breakthroughs which could have a major impact in re-establishing the United States as a leader in the science, technology, and commercialization of this very important class of materials”. I, for one, share his objective.

The full Bryant article can be found by clicking on http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2010/oct/magn...