Influence of additional compounds on coercivity of sintered Nd-Fe-B magnets

In this paper, we investigated the influence of additional compounds of Dy-Nb-Al, Nd-Cu-Al… on the coercivity of the sintered Nd16.5Fe77B6.5 magnets. The additional compounds were first prepared by arc-melting method and then ground into particles with size in the range of 40 - 80 nm using a high energy ball milling method. After that, the additional powder were mixed with micrometer Nd-Fe-B powder before magnetic anisotropic pressing, vacuum sintering and annealing. The structure of the magnets was thoroughly analyzed using X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy techniques. The magnetic properties of the magnets were investigated on a pulsed field magnetometer. The results show that the coercivity of the sintered Nd-Fe-B magnets can be improved by introducing additional nanoparticles to their grain boundaries. The improvement of the coercivity of the magnets is clearly dependent on composition and fraction of the additional compounds. The coercivity has been enhanced 40% for the magnets by adding 3 wt% of the Dy-free compound of Nd40Cu30Al30.