Development of high performance permanent magnets based on Nd-Fe-B system

Rare earth iron boron magnets based on Nd2Fe14B type is the most powerful permanent magnets, which have outstanding magnetic properties in the vicinity of room temperature. Production of NdFeB is carried out by two distinctly different processes. These include the conventional powder - sintering process acid consolidation of rapidly solidified powders. The latter is used to produce both bonded and anisotropic bulk magnets. NdFeB sintered magnets essentially consist of three basic phases; Nd2Fe14B (Phi), Nd1Fe4B4 phase (eta) and Nd-rich phase (n). Therefore, the magnetic properties of the magnets strongly depend on their microstructure. The current focus of NdFeB magnet research and development is on improvement of the magnetic properties such as the magnetic remanence (B-r) and intrinsic coercivity (H-ci), corrosion resistance and temperature characteristics of sintered magnets and rapidly solidified (melt spinning) magnets. Since the discovery of NdFeB magnets, their performance has been continuously enhanced and the current maximum energy product is achieved to be 444 kJ/m(3) (55.8 MGOe). Other processes also have been used for improving microstructure for developing high energy product NdFeB magnets. These processes include: i) mechanical alloying process of metals which uses an inter-diffusional reaction magnet, ii) HDDR process (hydrogenation, disprorportionation, desorption, recombination) of magnet powder, and iii) nanocrystalline composite magnet (exchange-coupled) which are composed of magnetically hard and soft grains. The negative side of the NdFeB magnet is their low corrosion resistance. They are sensitive to attack by both climatic and corrosive environments, resulting in deterioration of the hard magnetic properties of the magnet. In this paper the development of the high-energy product NdFeB based magnets in terms of improved microstructure and magnet processing methods is reviewed.