Accelerated Soft Magnetic Alloy Design and Synthesis Guided by Theory and Simulation

Project Personnel

Matthew Willard

Principal Investigator

Case Western Reserve University

Email

Cristian Ciobanu

Colorado School of Mines

Email

Richard James

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Email

Aaron Stebner

Colorado School of Mines

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Funding Divisions

Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI), Division of Materials Research (DMR), Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS)

Soft magnetic materials have use in power conversion, conditioning, distribution, and generation technologies, including transportation (electric vehicles), renewable energy (solar inverters), and aerospace (power converters and inductors) sectors. The term "soft magnet" refers to a magnetic material that easily changes magnetic pole directions using small magnetic fields. With over 20 percent of all generated electricity in the US being consumed by industrial electric motor drives, a mere 1 percent improvement in energy efficiency would result in significant financial and environmental benefits. The magnetic components are a major source of energy loss in the above-mentioned applications, motivating the need for soft magnets with better energy efficiency. The design cycle for new soft magnetic materials has so far been informed mainly by direct human engineering intuition and historic knowledge and bias, with materials development occurring by trial-and-error approaches. This Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) award supports research to establish, demonstrate, and validate a computation-guided framework for accelerated discovery of new, better performing soft magnetic materials. This approach will use computational materials science tools to guide alloy design, with the synthesis and experimental validation of properties performed for down-selected new alloys.

Publications

Design of soft magnetic materials
A. Renuka Balakrishna, and R. D. James
1/13/2022
A tool to predict coercivity in magnetic materials
A. Renuka Balakrishna, and R. D. James
4/1/2021
Experimentally correlating thermal hysteresis and phase compatibility in multifunctional Heusler alloys
A. A. Mendonça, L. Ghivelder, P. L. Bernardo, H. Gu, R. D. James, L. F. Cohen, and A. M. Gomes
11/2/2020
Origins of the transformability of nickel-titanium shape memory alloys
X. Chen, C. Ophus, C. Song, J. Ciston, S. Das, Y. Song, Y. Chumlyakov, A. M. Minor, V. Gavini, and R. D. James
10/26/2020
Bounds on the Energy of a Soft Cubic Ferromagnet with Large Magnetostriction
R. Venkatraman, V. Dabade, and R. D. James
9/19/2020
Branching of twins in shape memory alloys revisited
H. Seiner, P. Plucinsky, V. Dabade, B. Benešová, and R. D. James
8/1/2020
Tuning the hysteresis of a metal-insulator transition via lattice compatibility
Y. G. Liang, S. Lee, H. S. Yu, H. R. Zhang, Y. J. Liang, P. Y. Zavalij, X. Chen, R. D. James, L. A. Bendersky, A. V. Davydov, X. H. Zhang, and I. Takeuchi
7/15/2020
Phase transformations and compatibility in helical structures
F. Feng, P. Plucinsky, and R. D. James
10/1/2019
Tuning crystallographic compatibility to enhance shape memory in ceramics
J. Jetter, H. Gu, H. Zhang, M. Wuttig, X. Chen, J. R. Greer, R. D. James, and E. Quandt
9/23/2019
Interfacial energy of copper clusters in Fe-Si-B-Nb-Cu alloys
R. Jha, D. R. Diercks, N. Chakraborti, A. P. Stebner, and C. V. Ciobanu
3/1/2019
Micromagnetics of Galfenol
V. Dabade, R. Venkatraman, and R. D. James
9/14/2018
Phase engineering and supercompatibility of shape memory alloys
H. Gu, L. Bumke, C. Chluba, E. Quandt, and R. D. James
4/1/2018
Computational alloy design of (Co1-xNix)88Zr7B4Cu1 nanocomposite soft magnets
B. Dong, J. Healy, S. Lan, M. Daniil, and M. A. Willard
1/16/2018
Exceptional Resilience of Small-Scale Au30Cu25Zn45 under Cyclic Stress-Induced Phase Transformation
X. Ni, J. R. Greer, K. Bhattacharya, R. D. James, and X. Chen
11/10/2016

View All Publications

Research Highlights

Materials from Mathematics
Richard D. James, University of Minnesota
8/30/2018

Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF)