High-Throughput Methods for Searching New Permanent Magnet Materials

Highest performance Fe-Nd-B-based permanent magnets offer only low cost-effectiveness and shortened lifetime, both induced by their rare-earth (RE) content. Thus, the necessity for novel hard magnetic phases with better available RE metals, reduced RE content or fully free of RE is immense. As the number of so far unexplored alloy systems is large, the chances that such magnet materials still exist are good. The successful search for novel hard magnetic phases demands an efficient approach of restricting and prioritizing the search field as well as deployment of efficient synthesis and analysis methods. The high-throughput approaches are based on heterogeneous nonequilibrium states and the estimation of the intrinsic material parameters from the domain structure. The efficiency of the methods is demonstrated for the well-known systems Co-Sm and Fe-Nd-B. The methods are then applied to discover novel hard magnetic compounds with RE elements of better availability (Fe-Nd-(Ce,La,Y)-B) or smaller amount (Fe-Ce-(Ti,Zr)).