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: 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.