Effect of heat treatment on the shape of the hyperfine field induction distributions and magnetic properties of amorphous soft magnetic Fe62Co10Y8B20 alloy

One of the main objectives of physicists and material engineers is to improve the properties of metallic alloys. For the FeSi type of alloy, commonly used in power engineering, improvement of properties is achieved through a long and fairly complicated process; this process includes: directional roll forming, annealing, and supersaturation. Despite energy-intensive efforts, textured metal sheets of FeSi are magnetostrictive alloys with reduced operating capabilities at high frequencies. During the last half-century, a group of materials called the amorphous materials has been created for electrical purposes [1, 2]. These materials are characterized by almost zero magnetostriction, low total core losses during the magnetization process, a low value of the coercive fi eld, and high initial magnetic permeability and magnetic saturation [3]. Initially, such alloys were prepared only in the form of thin tapes, having an approximate thickness of 40 microns, which greatly limited their applications [4]. The systematic preparation of bulk amorphous alloys became possible when A. Inoue and colleagues developed three empirical criteria, described as follows. Inoue proposed that the alloy should consist of more than three components, whose radii differ by more than 12%, and also the main components of the alloy should be characterized by a negative heat mixing process [5]. Using these assumptions, amorphous material samples of thicknesses of several tens of millimeters can be produced [6, 7]. Such dimensions are already suffi cient to produce magnetic cores for transformers and chokes. Effect of heat treatment on the shape of the hyperfi ne fi eld induction distributions and magnetic properties of amorphous soft magnetic Fe62Co10Y8B20 alloy Konrad M. Gruszka, Marcin Nabialek, Katarzyna Bloch, Jacek Olszewski