Enhanced Crystalline Alignment of TERFENOL-D

"Giant magnetostrictive materials, specifically the alloys of TERFENOL-D possess a high energy density that enables compact, high power, broad-band sources and similar, high authority actuators for use in several different military and commercialapplications. Current manufacturing techniques, namely the ETREMA Crystal Growth (ECG) process, yield polycrystalline materials with a preferential crystal orientation of along the rod axis, but little to no long range order amongst the individualdendrites. While this structure provides for large strains as compared to alternate materials, increases of 20-30% in the strain output of TERFENOL-D can be realized if the rod was fully aligned, not only along the , but also with each of thecrystalline dendrites aligned parallel to one another. Phase I successfully showed that improvements to the microstructure and final magnetostrictive performance could be achieved by altering the thermal environment during solidification. The proposedPhase II effort is a series of experiments to define the specific process variables identified in Phase I. Once proven effective, the Phase II Option will perform the commercialization of this technology improvement by developing the necessarywork-instructions that will allow the new process to be readily inserted into the day-to-day manufacturing of TERFENOL-D."