Development of a novel method to obtain complex shaped magnetic structures for additive manufacturing

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2352855 _(Table of contents)

Hard magnetic materials do play a critical role in numerous industrial areas relates with magnetic tapes, hard drive units, speaker drivers, biomedical measurement devices, electric motors, hybrid cars, wind turbines. Since these areas include large scale manufacturing, size and cost of the magnetic material have a direct effect on it. Magnetic energy intensity and availability of magnetic material are the main characteristics that concern size and cost-effectiveness. Today, neodymium iron boron (NdFeB), aluminum nickel cobalt (Alnico), and ferrite are mostly used as magnetic materials. NdFeB is the most significant one among them because of its magnetic energy density. Nowadays, the world is experiencing a rare-earth material crisis. Moreover, because of its fragile nature, it is tough to make custom shaped / CNC milled NdFeB magnets, especially for prototyping. These are the main reasons that industry is in search of new, rare-earth free magnetic materials. A metastable iron nitride phase, Fe16N2 shows promising magnetic properties in literature and become prominent as a possible alternative to NdFeB. In this study, we aimed to propose a solution to aforementioned problems by finding a way to synthesize Fe16N2 particles by using ball-milled iron micro/nanoparticles and trying to utilize it with additive manufacturing method. Furthermore, we expected to increase anisotropy, and the magnetic energy density of printed material by manipulating it with a pulse magnetizer circuit. Considering the time consumption of the configuration and optimization of the oven system, we tried to prepare 3d printing system, pulse magnetizer system simultaneously. Therefore Fe16N2 was not used in these systems, instead, we used ball milled NdFeB and iron flakes to show proof of concept. Prepared Fe16N2 particles are characterized by using XRD and SEM analysis