Rare earth free Permanent Magnets

Permanent magnets are one of the essential components in many electrical and mechanical devices for energy generation, storage and conversion. Conventionally, permanent magnets based on rare-earth materials are preferred in all applications due to their high coercivity and high energy product (between 200 -400 kJ/m3). However, many applications such as electric motors in automobiles, energy storage devices such as flywheels do not require rare-earth magnets with such high energy density. Moreover, due to critical nature of rare-earth as a raw material, alternate materials sources are needed to substitute these materials in future. Ferrites are promising candidate materials to replace the rare-earth based magnets due to their abundance and cheap manufacturing process, although with lower energy density, coercivity and saturation magnetization compared to rare-earth based magnets. The challenge is to synthesize hybrid magnets with ferrites as one of the components with higher coercivity and energy product compared to existing ferrites, which can replace the rare-earths without compromising on performance of the devices at a much cheaper prices. In our case, we will be designing magnets by tuning the extrinsic properties such as phase purity, morphology, size and orientation of grains of a ferrite to improve the energy product. 

Exploration with Synchrotron and Neutrons

Structural and Magnetic properties of thin films and self-assembled nanoparticle systems are investigated by various x-ray and neutron scattering techniques at Large scale facilities such as ESRF and ILL, Grenoble, Bessy, Berlin and Hasylab, Hamburg.