from the I-just-want-to-celebrate-no-neodymium-living dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Since their relatively recent appearance on the commercial scene, rare-earth magnets have made quite a splash in the public imagination. The amount of magnetic energy packed into these tiny, shiny objects has led to technological leaps that weren’t possible before they came along, like the vibration motors in cell phones, or the tiny speakers in earbuds and hearing aids. And that’s not to mention the motors in electric vehicles and the generators in wind turbines, along with countless medical, military, and scientific uses.
These advances come at a cost, though, as the rare earth elements needed to make them are getting harder to come by. It’s not that rare earth elements like neodymium are all that rare geologically; rather, deposits are unevenly distributed, making it easy for the metals to become pawns in a neverending geopolitical chess game. What’s more, extracting them from their ores is a tricky business in an era of increased sensitivity to environmental considerations.
Luckily, there’s more than one way to make a magnet, and it may soon be possible to build permanent magnets as strong as neodymium magnets, but without any rare earth metals. In fact, the only thing needed to make them is iron and nitrogen, plus an understanding of crystal structure and some engineering ingenuity.
[...] Iron nitrides are nothing new. Nitriding processes, such as gas nitriding by exposing heated steel to ammonia, have been used for steel finishing for more than a century. The more complex iron nitride α”-Fe16N2 was first discovered in 1951; its magnetic properties were explored in the early 1970s and again in the 1990s as part of the search for new and better heads for hard drives and other magnetic recording media.
[...] Strong permanent magnets aren’t the only thing that iron nitrides might be good for. Soft magnetics, which are materials with lower coercivity and are good for things like the cores of transformers and inductors, or for read-write heads of magnetic media, may also be possible by doping α”-Fe16N2 with elements like carbon, oxygen, or boron. These dopants reduce the magnetic anisotropy of the crystal structure, making it harder to permanently magnetize them while maintaining high saturation magnetization.
There’s a lot of promise to so-called “clean-earth” magnets — so much so that the University of Minnesota has spun off a company, Niron Magnetics, to turn the concepts and processes into products. We’re keen to see where this technology goes, and look forward to powerful magnets made with nothing but rust and fertilizer.
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Wednesday September 07 2022, @12:29AM (4 children)
This is great. I hope it becomes a successful technology for both hard and soft magnetics.
Here are a few lines from the song Miracles by Insane Clown Posse that are particularly relevant:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 07 2022, @03:51AM
OT, but another song called Miracles that you reminded me to listen to again--
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m8izf-oXY4 [youtube.com]
Oh, and I also hope that these "green" super magnets are in production sooner than later.
(Score: 4, Funny) by inertnet on Wednesday September 07 2022, @07:00AM (2 children)
Due to their either attracting or repelling, it's very difficult for magnets to actually fuck.
That's why baby magnets are so rare.
(Score: 2) by fraxinus-tree on Wednesday September 07 2022, @07:58AM (1 child)
They do. By rotating.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday September 10 2022, @02:54PM
So you'd need two circular magnets with poles arranged
..N..
S...S
..N..
so that a 90-degree turn would change attraction to repulsion?