Effects of High Magnetic Fields on Phase Transformations in Amorphous Nd2Fe14B

We briefly summarize the results from a set of experiments designed to demonstrate the effects of high magnetic fields applied during thermal annealing of amorphous Nd2Fe14B produced through melt-spinning. A custom-built differential scanning calorimeter was used to determine the crystallization temperatures in zero-field and in applied fields of 20 kOe and 90 kOe, which guided subsequent heat treatments to evaluate phase evolution. X-ray diffraction was used for phase identification and transmission electron microscopy was employed for observation of the crystallite size and morphology. Magnetization measurements were also used to evaluate the resulting magnetic phases after thermomagnetic processing. While the applied magnetic fields do not appear to affect the crystallization temperature, significant effects on the kinetics of phase evolution are observed and correlated strongly to the magnetic behavior.