The Future of Permanent-Magnet-Based Electric Motors: How Will Rare Earths Affect Electrification?

In this review article, we focus on the relationship between permanent magnets and the electric motor, as this relationship has not been covered in a review paper before. With the increasing focus on battery research, other parts of the electric system have been neglected. To make electrification a smooth transition, as has been promised by governing bodies, we need to understand and improve the electric motor and its main component, the magnet.

Strontium hexaferrite platelets: a comprehensive soft X-ray absorption and Mössbauer spectroscopy study.

Platelets of strontium hexaferrite (SrFeO, SFO), up to several micrometers in width, and tens of nanometers thick have been synthesized by a hydrothermal method. They have been studied by a combination of structural and magnetic techniques, with emphasis on Mössbauer spectroscopy and X-ray absorption based-measurements including spectroscopy and microscopy on the iron-L edges and the oxygen-K edge, allowing us to establish the differences and similarities between our synthesized nanostructures and commercial powders. The Mössbauer spectra reveal a greater contribution of iron tetrahedral sites in platelets in comparison to pure bulk material.

The role of grain boundary scattering in reducing the thermal conductivity of polycrystalline XNiSn (X = Hf, Zr, Ti) half-Heusler alloys.

Thermoelectric application of half-Heusler compounds suffers from their fairly high thermal conductivities. Insight into how effective various scattering mechanisms are in reducing the thermal conductivity of fabricated XNiSn compounds (X = Hf, Zr, Ti, and mixtures thereof) is therefore crucial. Here, we show that such insight can be obtained through a concerted theory-experiment comparison of how the lattice thermal conductivity κ (T) depends on temperature and crystallite size.

Influence of the morphology of ferrite nanoparticles on the directed assembly into magnetically anisotropic hierarchical structures.

The effect of the morphology of ferrite nanoparticles on their assembly in a magnetic field was studied. Thin BaFe12O19 nanoplatelets were compared with isotropic, spherical or octahedral, CoFe2O4 nanoparticles, all of which were synthesized hydrothermally. The nanoplatelets and nanoparticles assembled into a variety of hierarchical structures from stable suspensions during the "drop deposition" and drying in a magnetic field.