SBIR Phase I: Nanostructured High-Strength Magnet for Automotive Applications

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project is to develop an improved permanent magnet that will allow cost reduction and/or vehicle weight reduction in automotive applications. This permanent magnet product will be fabricated from samarium cobalt magnetic particles that are encapsulated with a nanometer scale coating of iron or cobalt metal. Bonded permanent magnets manufactured using these nanostructured powders will have energy products at least 30% greater than samarium cobalt alone. This increase in performance means that the same motor can use 20% less magnetic material resulting in cost savings, weight savings, and reduction in the use of the critical rare earth element samarium. In addition, compact high-performance permanent magnets will help the United States reduce petroleum consumption and greenhouse gas emission with no adverse effect on vehicle performance. The technical objective in this Phase I research project is to validate the feasibility of achieving a high energy product nanostructured permanent magnet powder by coating commercially available samarium cobalt particles with nanometer-scale shells of iron or cobalt. Nanostructured permanent magnet powders, comprised of micron-size hard magnetic core particles surrounded by nanometer-scale soft magnetic shells, show promise as a replacement for high energy product rare earth permanent magnets. Commercial production of these materials, however, has proved problematic due to the difficulty of handling and coating ultrafine powders while maintaining clean core-shell interfaces. In this Phase I project, magnetic nanostructured powders will be fabricated using powder encapsulation technology has been shown to enable the production of nanometer-scale metallic shell layers on micron-sized metallic core particles in an ultra-clean atmosphere controlled environment. Using these powders, proof-of-concept bonded permanent magnets will be manufactured and evaluated for potential use in simple motors that utilize bonded samarium cobalt or neodymium iron boron magnets. High performance magnetic core-shell powders produced with this particle encapsulation technology will demonstrate the possibility of achieving reduced rare-earth-content high energy product permanent magnets and lay the foundation for commercial-scale production of these materials.