Additive Manufacturing of Nanocrystalline Soft Magnets

Background

The ferromagnetic material has been widely used for e-motor relate applications since 2019 with a global annual growth rate of 3.9%. Ferromagnetic materials usually possess high magnetic performance can be approached by controlling the microstructure. This project is kindly funded by FORD motor company. Significant applications including e-motor magnetic storage devices, magnetic sensor and magnetic shield.

Innovation

• The first innovation is the additive manufacturing → FINEMET nanocrystalline material by SLM

• The second innovation is to introduce oxidation layers during fabrication process.

• The third innovation will be microstructure control by introducing nanoparticles.

Approach

The experiment will be divided into several parts. To start with, shooting for the range of processing parameters is necessary to validate the inspired numbers from literature. Then, optimizing the existing data, taking the density of as-printed material as the criteria and maximizing the cooling rate by controlling the scanning speed. Lastly characterize the ferromagnetism.

Achievement

The thermal gredient mapping of single layers has been done.

The processing parameters are narrow into the expected range.

Trend of desired density matches the suspect based on processing parameters.