Prof. K. Hono from the National Institute for Materials Sciences (NIMS), Japan, was invited to visit NIMTE and gave a presentation on Toward the development of high coercivity permanent magnets for (hybrid) electric vehicles on 25th May 2011.
During the presentation, Hono firstly gave an overview of his research group, and then introduced their work on permanent magnetic materials with high coercivity and free heavy rare earth. He said that his team has analyzed the distribution of the elements in the grain boundary phase, and the phase composition by the advanced Atom Probe Tomographic Microscopes and other characterizing methods. Based on that, his team made great progress to obtain high coercivity (near 30kOe) of free heavy rare earth Nd-Fe-B magnets while the grain size was less than 3 um. At the time, they increased the coercivity of the HDDR powder and Sm-Fe-N magnets dramatically.
After the presentation, Hono visited the laboratory of the Division of Magnetic Materials, and the research issues that they were both interested in were discussed between Hono and the professors from NIMTE. (Liu Jingjing Reports)