Research progress in high-performance soft magnetic alloys

Abstract

Soft magnetic materials have been widely applied in modern industries as energy materials. In recent years, with the increasingly high frequency and miniaturization of magnetic components, as well as the call of energy conservation and environmental protection, the development and research of high-performance soft magnetic material are of great important significance. The present work generalized the development history of soft magnetic alloys comprehensively, from the viewpoints of chemical compositions, microstructures, magnetic properties, application fields, and advantages and disadvantages of different soft magnetic alloys. The involved alloy systems include primarily traditional crystalline alloys, amorphous/nanocrystalline alloys, and high entropy alloys. It is found that the microstructure induced by alloy compositions plays a dominant role in soft magnetic property, especially the coercivity. Then the influence factors on the coercivity of alloys and the related micro-mechanisms were discussed, in which the grain size in traditional alloys or particle size in nano-crystalline alloys is crucial to achieve lower coercivity. Therefore, the development of the micro-mechanisms of coercivity in high entropy soft magnetic alloys was described. Finally, it was expected that high entropy soft magnetic alloys would be more beneficial to modulate alloy properties due to the diversification of microstructures induced by the mixing of multi-principal elements, which shows great potential to serve as a new generation of high temperature soft magnet materials.

Keywords

• soft magnetic alloy
• high entropy alloy
• fe-based alloy
• amorphous/nano-crystalline alloy
• coercivity
• microstructure