from the this-time-we-invented-our-way-around-China dept.
Motor Trend is reporting on early production of a new permanent magnet material https://www.motortrend.com/features/niron-magnetics-clean-earth-permanent-magnets-ces-2025/ suitable for replacing the rare-earth magnets used, for example, in electric car motors, as well as loud speakers and many other products.
Invented some time back by university researchers and now in the pilot production stage (with suitably large investors like car companies),
Science has long known that a certain rare phase of iron nitride, known as an alpha-double-prime crystal structure of Fe16N2, holds extremely strong magnetic properties. But when produced by conventional means over the decades, the phase would degrade into more common, less magnetic phases. Then researchers at the University of Minnesota figured out a way to form this magic magnet material on a nano-scale using chemical vapor deposition or liquid phase epitaxy, and then developed a process for compacting and sintering nanoparticles of α″-Fe16N2 into magnets in the sizes and form factors allowing direct replacement of today's rare-earth permanent magnet motors.
Magnetic strength in the magnets used in electric motors is measured in tesla (where 1 tesla = 10,000 Gauss, for those more familiar with the unit used to measure Earth's magnetic pull). Weaker hard ferrite (iron-oxide) permanent magnets typically max out at around 0.35 tesla. The world's strongest permanent magnets made of neodymium measure around 1.4‑1.6 teslas. Niron's Clean Earth iron nitride permanent magnets peg the meter at 2.4 teslas. Niron Clean Earth magnets are also said to lose less magnetism over the typical operating temperature range than today's rare-earth permanent magnets.
Better yet: Niron's entire manufacturing process, from raw ore material to finished magnets, can be produced in a single factory on existing equipment, with 80 percent less CO2 and vastly less water usage, at a price that is currently on par with rare-earth magnets and utterly immune to price volatility due to supply chain and geopolitical forces.
Further icing on the cake: the iron is best sourced from iron salts that are a byproduct of steel manufacturing, with nitrogen sourced from ammonia. Produce that ammonia from air and water in a location that generates surplus solar or wind energy, and you get both clean nitrogen and a source of clean hydrogen that can help power the process.
One less thing to import from China...
For some perspective, here's a page on very high power research magnets (note, these are not permanent magnets as described above), https://new.nsf.gov/science-matters/maglab-makes-magic-magnets
The 100 tesla pulsed magnet at MagLab's Los Alamos site produces the highest nondestructive magnetic field in the world. Higher-field magnets exist but can't withstand a field that high and explode after brief experiments. By pulsing the magnet in bursts that last 15 milliseconds, Los Alamos holds the world record for the highest field ever generated without blowing something up, enabling rare precision measurements.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RedGreen on Thursday January 09, @12:24PM (11 children)
Sounds good the less we get from murdering slimy bastards the better it is. Time to start banning their ships traveling in our waters too or at the very least have some mysterious sinking of them. A cable gets cut, a ship ends up at the bottom of the ocean, that is what happens when countries perform acts of war against you. And they have long since crossed that line it is no longer competition they are engaged in...
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday January 09, @02:30PM (9 children)
Oh my god, every last one of us Americans would be dead if nations suffered consequences for unjustified acts of war against other nations.
Be careful what you wish for.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DannyB on Thursday January 09, @03:09PM (3 children)
Can it really be called unjustified if our glorious leaders thought there might somehow be profit in it?
The age of men is over. The time of the Orc has come.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mcgrew on Thursday January 09, @04:53PM
Can it really be called unjustified if our glorious leaders thought there might somehow be profit in it?
Not if you worship wealth. I realize that plutocracy is the most prevalent religion in the US and possibly the world, but not all of us are on board. Personally, I call it unjustified; especially what we did to the natives, Africans, and African descendants.
It pains me that the president-elect's favorite president was Jackson, a murderous son of a bitch who killed innocents on the Trail of Tears. Plain evil, but the worship of money glorifies evil.
Remember, your wealth ends when you end. There are no dead millionaires, only corpses that once were millionaires. I personally pity the wealthy, they have the most to lose when they leave this existence.
A man legally forbidden from possessing a firearm is in charge of America's nuclear arsenal. Have a nice day.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 09, @06:52PM (1 child)
Profit for whom?
Are we still in trickle-down world where more profit for Bezos means that he will open more warehouses for people to stand in and sort packages all day for little more than minimum wage? Is that the prosperity we are striving for?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by ikanreed on Thursday January 09, @07:25PM
The opinions of voters have no measurable effect on policy in the US. Profit of people who count.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RedGreen on Thursday January 09, @07:53PM (4 children)
"Oh my god, every last one of us Americans"
Well thankfully I am not an American and you are correct your country will be up to their eyeballs in it if we counted all the scummy things they have done in this regards. You incoming moron in chief seem hell bent on keeping that fine tradition up with all the countries he threatens to invade now before even taking office.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09, @09:43PM
Well, at least he is entertaining in a different way (as a non US person I don't get to vote in US elections, I am just along for the ride).
So far he's the only one I've seen with the "chutzpah" to telegraph in advance which countries he is going to bomb/invade/annex, and be bluntly honest about it to boot.
The other presidents at least had the decency to wait to get into the drivers seat before they started their imperial conquests, and even then they would cover their deeds with euphemisms such as "humanitarian bombing", "bringing democracy" and other such platitudes.
He reminds me a bit of Berlusconi, but with violence instead of sex, and with thousands of nukes at his disposal.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Friday January 10, @01:45PM
I'm flabbergasted. Probably not serious all the way, talking his mind. Being the idiot he is, I believe he has no clue about what happened to despots with similar thoughts without exception in history. But he has an example before him in plain sight. How blind is he?
(Score: 2) by EJ on Friday January 10, @08:27PM (1 child)
Alexander the Great didn't get that title by being a pacifist. It wasn't that long ago that conquest was considered the ultimate thing to be admired for.
I imagine future historians may remember us as being weak and pathetic. It could go either way. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Friday January 10, @11:41PM
"I imagine future historians may remember us as being weak and pathetic."
That is my description of the chicken shit spineless Democrats basically forever now for everything they let the Repugnant Party get away with is unbelievable. It is well north of fifty years they have let them get away with it and those idiots have the actual facts on their side to prove their point. The Repugnant Party just plain make it up and run with it, while the Democrats do jack shit to call them out for the traitorous lying bastards they are..
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 09, @06:51PM
Sounds too good to be true, for now.
Get the production running at scale and tell me the true cost and performance.
2.4T in a permanent magnet could also be revolutionary for strip-mall based MRI clinics.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by mcgrew on Thursday January 09, @04:44PM (7 children)
The one I bought in 2023 got totaled, I bought another one in November (EVs are to pistons what the Model-T was to a horse and buggy). It has close to a three hundred mile range, but these new magnets, if I have read the article correctly, are almost twice as strong as rare earth magnets. So given the same battery it should go almost twice as far, and have far more horsepower; the new EV is almost as fast as the two fastest cars I've ever owned, and takes off faster than either.
Not just electric cars, but anything that uses magnetism. Your furnace blower, air conditioner compressor, refrigerator, speakers; anything with magnets will be almost twice as cheap to run with these new magnets.
A man legally forbidden from possessing a firearm is in charge of America's nuclear arsenal. Have a nice day.
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 09, @06:59PM (6 children)
>So given the same battery it should go almost twice as far
Call me when the math for that has been shown in practice.
Your motors can be more compact with stronger magnets, but they're already over 90% efficient at converting electrical power into torque / rotary power. Even if "wonder magnets" took you all the way to 100% efficiency, you're not getting even a 10% boost in range per unit power in the batteries. Regenerative braking could get a boost too, but nothing like a 1:1 correlation with magnet strength.
By the way: you don't need permanent magnets in electric motors at all, you can just pit coil vs coil and get very efficient motors that way. It's relatively easy to imagine how to do that using brushed commutators, but there's also the variable reluctance approach which is also currently reporting 90-95% efficiency in practice.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday January 09, @09:26PM (5 children)
By the way: you don't need permanent magnets in electric motors at all, you can just pit coil vs coil
True, but it will take twice as much electricity for the same amount of work.
A man legally forbidden from possessing a firearm is in charge of America's nuclear arsenal. Have a nice day.
(Score: 5, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 09, @10:17PM (1 child)
https://www.controleng.com/articles/new-electrostatic-motor-design-90-less-copper-no-magnets-ultra-efficiency/ [controleng.com]
You haven't designed any bridges I should know about, have you?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by mcgrew on Saturday January 11, @07:00PM
As I have never taken an engineering class, I would hope not!
A man legally forbidden from possessing a firearm is in charge of America's nuclear arsenal. Have a nice day.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 09, @10:24PM
And this is the more traditional form:
https://www.emworks.com/en/blog/motor-design/switched-reluctance-motor-srm-is-the-future-of-electric-vehicles [emworks.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Saturday January 11, @06:41AM (1 child)
Most of the electric energy in an electromagnetic motor goes into [distance]x[field strength]. The amount that goes into energizing the electomagnets, and which is lost in resistive heating and eddy currents etc, is negligible in comparison. It will NOT take twice as much electricity for the same amount of work.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday January 11, @06:44PM
The reason motors work at all is MAGNETISM. Whether electromagnets or permanent magnets, they work on the principle that opposites charges attract and negative repel. In a normal motor, half of the magnets are electromagnets. For all of them to be electromagnets, all will need the power to be energized.
Not only would it take twice the electricity it would be far more complex, as both the rotor and stater would need to be powered.
In short, you could make a motor without permanent magnets, but doing so would make no sense whatever.
A man legally forbidden from possessing a firearm is in charge of America's nuclear arsenal. Have a nice day.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday January 09, @05:23PM (1 child)
One of the most fun things to do with journalist articles is find comparisons and put their comments in context.
Weirdly this claim is both too high AND too low.
KJMagnetics has nice parametric search features like buying electronic parts from Digikey. So its easy to sort by Surface field descending, and they don't sell anything above 7734 gauss aka 0.7734 T. That's the highest surface field you can get COTS from a single magnet from an industrial engineering supplier AFAIK.
https://www.kjmagnetics.com/magnet-finder.asp [kjmagnetics.com]
There are tiers of magnet suppliers and I didn't check them all but maybe AMF has something slightly different deep in the decimal places, but I doubt it. The lower tier suppliers don't have the detailed engineering data required to design anything more specific than "it sticks to my fridge".
Now you can go halbach arrays which are pretty cool machine shop puzzle usually not that easy to manufacture. "Fairly Easy" to get the low 1T range but the CERN guys two decades ago reached 4.45T in a ridiculously small volume, although glancing thru, it looks very expensive...
https://accelconf.web.cern.ch/p03/papers/WPAE024.pdf [web.cern.ch]
Aside from obvious motor applications another cool thing to do with permanent magnets is make NMR machines (like MRI but zero dimensional for material analysis rather than imaging) You can do earth field NMR and its been a long term goal to do that in my basement for some decades I'm sure I'll get around to it real soon now LOL.
Some decades ago, NMR builders had a "moth to the flame" problem with halbach arrays where strong fields give better signals but stronger arrays are less smooth and field variation ruins the output signal so there's an optimum design of higher strength but smoother field that give the best signal. Also even if you can get engineering specs its just like buying a "1K" resistor if you think that "10%" tolerance resistor is 1.0000000000000K you are in for a big surprise LOL and the more elaborate the array the more sensitive it is to variation. And the software to design magnetic arrays used to be (probably still is) enormously expensive and esoteric to use.
In summary, you can'y buy a single industrial magnet with a surface field over "meh one tesla" and you can build arrays (at enormous expense) that go well over, so either way the 1.5T claim is wrong.
Something that's I hope has changed in the last 20, 30 years, is it should be possible to buy a large shipment of large powerful engineering grade magnets, serial number each magnet, individually test the surface field of EACH magnet, then feed that pile of data into a software optimization routine that simulates the smoothest possible field for an array using specific magnets in specific locations, then feed the CAD design to a 3-d printer and/or full on CNC machine tools to make a very precise design.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Friday January 10, @09:50AM
> then feed that pile of data into a software optimization routine that simulates the smoothest possible field for an array using specific magnets in specific locations, then feed the CAD design to a 3-d printer and/or full on CNC machine tools to make a very precise design.
Your proposal is a good one, but the correct way to tune the field is by using "shims" i.e. magnetic iron blocks. This paper they got 10^-4 field quality (but note these were dipole + quadrupole magnets for accelerator stuff) using some field measurement and then an optimisation routine to choose the shim location:
https://accelconf.web.cern.ch/ipac2017/papers/thpik007.pdf [web.cern.ch]
Permanent magnets are very sensitive to thermal fluctuations and shocks, so cutting a permanent magnet would cause degradation in field quality rather than improvement.
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Thursday January 09, @05:47PM (2 children)
One minor fly in the ointment is the coercivity in produced foils "was recently" a tenth that of neo super magnets and even the most optimistic hand waving was "maybe it'll be half of neo or a tenth of samarium someday in a theoretical model if we're lucky".
The above may have changed, of course.
coercivity can be described with formulas and hysteresis loop graphs and stuff but a crappy analogy is "how hard can you smack it with an opposing field before it gets overwhelmed".
So coercivity is quite irrelevant for something like a desktop size homelab size NMR analyzer unless I do something moronic like try to NMR a strong magnet inside it LOL in which case it might totally F up my magnets.
However its a bit rougher for something like a motor, as the motor windings will fight the permanent magnet trying to demagnetize it.
You'll sometimes read this as "magnetically soft" vs "magnetically hard".
These nitride magnets used to recently be famous for being very strong but relatively soft.
The engineering range of numbers is very small compared to how we can control and use and measure something like time or current. A really decent super soft transformer core might be under a thousandth of a kA/m vs under a thousand-ish kA/m for a decent neo magnet. Samarium magnets kick ass and max out around a couple thousand. These nitride magnets used to be known as about as "tough" magnetically as the cheap alnico magnets probably in your kitchen cabinet doors or maybe on your fridge.
You get used to engineers being able to manipulate currents from femtoamps to megamps but the total engineering range of human civilization for coercivity is only about a million from the softest transformer steel to the toughest permanent magnet ever made; a depressingly narrow range.
Anyway "strong" field is nice and useful for many applications, but "hard to demagnetize" is pretty important for some apps like motors and apparently these nitride magnets just are not all that.
I can't get a straight answer on the Curie temp of these nitride magnets; appears not to be an issue, I've seen google results vaguely around the "dull red" level of temps (like five to seven hundred ish celsius) Its probably a lack of shippable product that prevents serious testing.
Unless something surprising has been reported by technical press as opposed to clickbait press, I donno about placing these magnets in giant high power motors...
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by DadaDoofy on Friday January 10, @12:05AM (1 child)
Which version of ChatGPT was this?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10, @02:36AM
LOL I was thinking the same thing. VLM's very own no doubt.