Iron Nitride Permanent Magnets – An Alternative to Rare Earth Magnets (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://license.umn.edu/technologies/20120016_iron-nitride-permanent-magnet-alternative-to-rare-earth-and-neodymium-magnets <comment><USER2> This is important, much more than most people think. You don't realize how many things around you need strong magnets.

> This technology for producing iron nitride permanent magnets has been > exclusively licensed.

Interesting — I wonder to whom.

<comment><USER3> I could come up with electrical motors and generators. Before that I saw them for controlling the arm of spinning hard drives, and those aren't used that much anymore. What else is there?

<comment><USER4> > _spinning hard drives, and those aren 't used that much anymore_

Hey! Are you basing this statement on your own experience of your personal/business hardware? Because spinning rust has never been more heavily used, for bulk on/near-line storage.

Judging by the list of alumni from Prof. Wang's group, HDD manufacturers have a strong demand for advanced applications of magnets, plus a tiny fraction from biomedical techs.

[0]: [http://www.nanospin.umn.edu/people-0](http://www.nanospin.umn.edu/people-0)

<comment><USER3> You were right, I did not consider bulk storage outside my personal use. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Theoretical limit of its magnetic properties are more than twice the maximum reported magnetic energy product for a rare earth magnet"

Call me a pessimist, but if the theoretical is more than twice the actual for rare earths that means the new magnet might well be weaker than the old ... in reality.

It's doubly suspicious that they don't mention the theoretical vs reality for the rare earths.

<comment><USER6> The theoretical maximum for a neodymium magnet is grade N64, i.e. 64 Mega- Gauss Oersted.

<comment><USER7> Hmmm, from the summary: "The theoretical magnetic energy product for this iron nitride (Fe16N2) magnet is 130 mega gauss oersteds"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thank christ, have you tried to source NdB magnets at quantity lately? I hope these get to be produced at scale soon, although unfortunately it sounds like the technology has been "exclusively licensed," which in my experience means a 500% markup from whatever its aiming to supplant once it finally hits production. The price of progress, I guess.

But yeah, I tried to order a few hundred rare earth magnets from China (where almost all of the world's rare earth metals come from) and got told that they can't export "pill-shaped" objects...bullshit, that's the same mealy-mouthed politically-backed excuse that they gave for not shipping a few dozen CCP badges through customs.

Anyways, the patent application doesn't make it sound THAT hard. Maybe it's something you could DIY for personal use: [https://google.com/patents/US20140299810](https://google.com/patents/US20140299810)

Maybe someone who knows more about...all of this...can correct me, but tl;dr: Take an iron wire or sheet of diameter/thickness ~10μm-1mm. Strain it by pulling it in opposite directions, e.g. using two rollers pulling in opposite directions. While the iron is strained, heat it to ~125-600C in an atmosphere of N2 or N2+inert gas at ~0.15-1.5 Pascals for 2-10 hours. You actually need atomic Nitrogen and this part of the patent is vague, but I think ~500C might be enough to break the N2 bonds? They also describe a urea infusion process, but that sounds more difficult for a garage effort. Anyways, if that all works, it sounds like you can stack 'em to make larger and more powerful magnets. Anyone up for it?

<comment><USER9> There's a lot of canceled items in the patent, I wonder if that's because it was too vague to be part of the patent? I agree with your interpretation of the manufacturing process. They expose the sheet of <001> Fe to either nitrogen gas (N2) or NH3. NH3 does break apart with high temperature but ideally you want to work with N2 instead for safety reasons. It's more efficient to break the N2 bond using a cracking source, they use a plasma arc to break the bond of N2.

The usual problem is always going to be compositional control, you know, coming up with a method that preserves the rather excessive stoichiometry of Fe16N2. There's a bunch of other phases that can be achieved with simpler stoichiometries, so the long term stability of this magnetic phase is of concern to me. What are the ideal operating conditions of this magnet before interdiffusion occurs and we lose the right stoichiometry? Maybe there's a small window that could render this material inapplicable to many mechanical or thermal conditions.

Oxidation of the Fe sheet before nitridization is another concerns. Fe oxidizes very easily and would become a barrier for the nitrogen.

The other concern is that they characterize the magnet's performance only on the product of saturation magnetization and coercivity, and mention using ion bombardment to enhance the coercivity. This can be interpreted to mean that the Fe16N2 has a poor coercivity which means that it's a magnet that is very easy to switch with weak magnetic fields or thermal energy. Not what you want for permanent magnet applications.

So I still have a lot of questions and concerns although I do think it's worth pursuing this material because it makes a lot of financial sense as Fe and N are super common and easier to process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> [http://www.designworldonline.com/coming-revolution-high- stre...](http://www.designworldonline.com/coming-revolution-high-strength- magnets) (December 2014) seems to give a wider overview of non-rare earth magnet development: FeN, MnBi, Ce and exchange spring magnets.

</comment><comment><USER11> Here is an article with a bit more info about Iron Nitride (it has quotes from Professor Jian-Ping Wang who is cited in the original link).

[https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/research-news/rare- ea...](https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/research-news/rare-earth-free- magnet-made-from-cheap-materials-2016-05/)

Looks like there is a way to go before commercialization, but then that article was written in May 2016 so maybe they've improved the process since then.

> It is only a tiny sample, a film 500nm thick, but it is the real thing.

<comment><USER12> According to the patent application[0] it's from 2012.

[0][https://www.google.com/patents/US20140299810](https://www.google.com/patents/US20140299810)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some important applications properties I didn't see listed in the brief UofM blurb:

Curie temperature: - at what temperature do these magnets start to lose their magnetic energy?

Coercivity: - how easily are these magnets demagnetized by external energy input (vibration, inductive kickback from motor windings, transformers, etc.)?

</comment><comment><USER14> This looks to be up an update from several months ago, with graphs and data.

However the text is very domain specific, I can't follow it myself:

[http://www.nanospin.umn.edu/new-magnetic- materials](http://www.nanospin.umn.edu/new-magnetic-materials)

<comment><USER15> They use the term "giant saturation magnetization" to describe an iron nitride magnet that they made. The saturation magnetization is the point where the magnetization in a material cannot increase any further. Think of it like a maximum strength of a magnet. Neodymium magnets have their saturation magnetization around 1 Tesla, and they reported that their iron nitride magnet has a saturation point at 2.68 Tesla, so it's greater. (The magnetics community likes putting words such as "giant", "colossal", and "extraordinary" in front of terms to emphasize how big something is. Especially when it comes to magnetoresistance)

BH max is a characteristic of a magnetic material. You can think of it as a kind of magnetic energy density rating, so more is better. What you linked to showed that the iron nitride magnet they made had a BH max similar to a neodymium magnet.

Also, I love the name "Minnealloy". Very Minnesotan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love how US beats foreign cartels or shortages by true technology (fracking, magnets).

<comment><USER17> This isn't just an American thing.

<comment><USER18> Perhaps, but we don't love it when others do this.

<comment><USER19> Sure we do. They just become naturalized Americans if we can get our hooks into them, and honorary Americans if we can't. America loves being the sewer for everyone else's brain drains.

Just look at great Americans like Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Werner von Braun, Leo Szilard, Alexander Graham Bell, William J. Kroll, Alexey Pajitnov, Igor Sikorsky, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting to note that this[0] article from Magnetics Magazine in 2016 has exactly zero mention of FeN magnets.

Vapor?

[0] [http://www.magneticsmagazine.com/main/articles/permanent- mag...](http://www.magneticsmagazine.com/main/articles/permanent-magnets-in-a- changing-world-market/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Science beats scarce natural resources. Again

<comment><USER22> Call me when science transmogrifies base metals into gold for less than it costs to dig the stuff up from the ground: humanity has been trying since before science/ when science _was_ alchemy.

<comment><USER23> Gold sucks compared to aluminum and other metals for most uses. Aluminum used to be way more expensive than gold. And when science was "alchemy" aluminum metal wasn't even known. It wasn't produced until the 19th Century, and at first absurdly expensive.

And we can, of course, transmute lead into gold using science. It's expensive and pointless, of course. And gold itself is mostly valued for its rarity and shininess.

But we can transmute carbon into diamond for less than the market price for diamonds. Diamonds are more expensive than gold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is interesting. I am an Electrical Power Engineer, and at my tech school, our Senior Thesis projects are essentially real Engineering firms coming to the school and assigning a group of engineers to work on a project they are actually working on in real life.

The company I worked under makes electric motors for navy ships and other government contracts. There are enormous machines in side of these things, but rare earth metals are economically volatile, on a scale unlike most other industries.

China and Malaysia have most of the rare earth metal mines (we had a bastanite mine in CA where you can mine for rare most of the rare earth metals, but the liberals did not want the pollution in California, so as a result, they closed down the mine (before it reopened for a bit and then went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year) and made America dependent on rare earth metals from Asia, where for a long time, and probably still now, they have zero emissions policies so we are effectively polluting the planet more (but not in my backyard so it feels good to feel clean and drive a prius as long as all the rare earth metals and pollution caused mining it are done by people working 1/26th the pay in China breathing in that air in not me, it makes me feel green), until Elon Musk has recently come and been working with mining companies in the U.S. for his operations.

At the time in 2011 when I was a senior working on this project and the explicit motivation for investing in research for this, China had overnight banned global trade on rare earth metals with 24hrs notice for 6months, to focus on their internal development, skyrocketing the price of 90% of the worlds rare earth metal production by over 9000%

At that time, my engineering group was contracted to come up do motor design and look for utilizing either less rare earth metals while meeting the same specifications for output or looking up for alternative metals.

We ended with a form of a Halbach array, which arranges rotor and stator magnets in a permutation of an orientation where the magnetic field is increased on one side and cancelled on the other, reducing the amount of loss not going into the relationship between the stator and the rotor and increasing the magnetic field where it did.

There is still a lot of need for this kind of design and optimization, and I ended up in a different niche of Electrical Power but, people were and are dishing out alot of money around this kind of work for good reason.

I looked up patents a few years after I graduated around this kind of thing and they have spiked up significantly in the passed few years, particularly with halbach arrays.

And you are right, most people don't realize rare earth metals are required in electric motors, wind turbines, inverters for solar panels and most movements we associate with sustainable energy, despite the fundamental components being extremely rare economically volatile, and relatively no innovation going on in the space of addressing these issues.

<comment><USER25> > but the liberals did not want the pollution in California, so as a result, > they closed down the mine (before it reopened for a bit and then went into > Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year)

Oh, so it was the fault of liberals, and not of dumping by China? That's news to me.

Besides, Tesla Motors has shown that the good old AC induction motor, which uses such rare materials as copper, iron, and aluminum, works quite nicely as an automotive drive motor. You seem to be conflating lithium mining with rare earths here.

<comment><USER26> 'liberal' sounds like over-generalization that's common today.

'environmentalist' would have been a more specific political label.

<comment><USER24> I didn't say all liberals, I said liberals. I'm not sure there were any republicans apart of this but there could have been.

I concede this to you, I should not over generalize. I don't identify entirely with either and being assumed to be one or the other is annoying but more importantly degrading society as a whole with these increasingly polarizing and decreasingly diverse categorizations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> First thought 'no way!' \- neodymium magnets had a huge impact on electronics and mechanical systems... and then twice the strength? Incredible!

<comment><USER28> As another poster said, iron's _theoretical_ max is twice the _currently_ available rare earth strength. It's apples and oranges.

<comment><USER29> From a quick google search it does indeed look like the theoretical BHmax of rare-earth magnets is about 60 MGOe, so I think that might just be poor wording from the article. That said, I would agree that we should be waiting to sing their praises until they can beat rare-earth magnets in practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> As a bonus - this is as environmentally friendly and cheap as they come.

We have a lot of both fe an ni.

<comment><USER31> > We have a lot of both fe an ni.

Nitpick - "Ni" stands for Nickel. The magnets described in the article are Iron Nitride - that means Iron and Nitrogen (Fe16N2), not Iron and Nickel.

Your point stands - Nitrogen is extremely abundant.

<comment><USER19> Both of those are actually common enough that if a biological ecosystem ever discovered a competitive advantage for very powerful magnetic crystals, it might have come up with Fe16N2 instead of just the magnetite (Fe3O4) and greigite (Fe3S4) that currently form the basis of biological magnetism.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosome)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's a miracle. How do they work?

</comment><comment><USER33> Can we get a [2012] on the title?

<comment><USER20> Title has apparently been changed to 2014.

Has anything come of this revolutionary creation since? I.e., any actual magnets in production?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Goes to show that stupidity isn't dead. I wonder what kind of "licensing fees" will they require? I also wonder how much of this research was paid for by public money?

Instead of making this available to everyone so that these kinds of magnets can get out there, they want to scrooge first. If I recall correctly, universities that have gone down this path have simply stalled the progress of mankind instead of pushing it forward.

<comment><USER30> If public money went into development - the public is definitely entitled to a cut.

<comment><USER35> The US government typically gets non-exclusive license rights to any patents developed under US grants.</comment></comment></comment>


How technological innovation can massively reduce the cost of living - <AUTHOR> https://readplaintext.com/how-technological-innovation-can-massively-reduce-the-cost-of-living-91766dc83691 <comment><USER2> I think this is a pretty insightful way of looking at the problem. I disagree with the notion that Basic Income won't work because { Welfare | Communism } has been shown not to work. But giving that a pass ...

One of the more interesting disussions about "what would you do if you won a billion dollars?" was looking at some technological solution for homelessness. That lead to an interesting discussion about what might a completely energy neutral 21st century 'cave' structure look like? People are exceptionally ingenious in some of their encampment designs, is there any way to facilitate "better" encampments (safer, more sanitary, etc) other than just building the traditional homeless shelter? (or warehouse with cots in it?)

I also like the idea of different "home" modalities, if you lived in an apartment complex with built in high speed network access and an "office" room in the apartment, would that help lower your cost of living? What sorts of jobs could you have in that sort of situation? It is an interesting thing to think about.</comment>