Iron Nitride Permanent Magnets – An Alternative to Rare Earth Magnets (2014)
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.<p>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.<p>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&#x2F;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.<p>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%<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>And you are right, most people don&#x27;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.