Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

This project is in collaboration with General Motors of Canada. It aims at identifying, characterizing and developing low-cost Fe-based permanent magnets for high temperature applications. Such magnets are needed for the automotive industry, mainly for the electric motors in addition to other automobile parts. This research will also benefit a wide range of industries such as aeronautical, motor production, electronic equipment and wind energy. Permanent magnets are also necessary for components used in national defense activities. The magnets that satisfy to some extent the current technological demands contain significant amounts of expensive rare earth elements. More importantly, currently there is almost complete dependence on foreign sources to supply these rare earth metals. In this project, the use of these metals will be minimized and the expensive rare earths (Nd, Dy and Sm) will be replaced with a more abundant and less expensive element such as Ce.The search for new magnetic materials will be based on the high-throughput screening of multicomponent metallic systems. This method is a unique expertise of the applicant's group that has been used to discover new intermetallic phases with specific physical or mechanical properties. The method is based on combination of thermodynamic calculations and diffusion couples experiments. The preliminary thermodynamic calculations allow narrowing the area of interest that significantly reduces the number of experiments. The experimental part is based on the preparation and analysis of multicomponent diffusion couples and diffusion multiples combined with key alloys. Magnetic compounds will be identified using Magnetic Force Microscopy. Detailed characterization of their magnetic properties will be performed at GM's laboratories in collaboration with Drs. Pinkerton and Herbst.The feasibility of this methodology has been demonstrated by our research group on a typical magnetic material system (Fe-Nd-B) and proved to provide the necessary information in an efficient and timely manner. In this project, these steps will be followed for a wide range of systems.