Production of magnetically soft materials by mechanical milling?

It may be possible to produce a useful magnetically soft material for industrial applications such as high-temperature motors by means of mechanical milling. The complexity of the micromagnetics involved makes it difficult to come to a theoretical conclusions concerning the potential for creating soft magnetic materials with high saturation magnetization and low hysteresis loss from materials with substantial crystalline anisotropy by using the exchange interaction to couple many grains with different anisotropy axes. This should be a tractable experimental problem starting with supermendur (49Fe49Co2V) which has very small anisotropy and then working with less and less Co which increases the saturation magnetization, the magnetic anisotropy and the electrical resistivity while lowering the magnetostriction and the cost. It is argued that this is an interesting problem. (C) 1999 Acta Metallurgica Inc.