Additive Manufacturing of Fe₄₀Co₃₀Mn₁₅Al₁₅ Soft Magnetic Material via Laser Powder Bed Fusion

Soft magnetic materials play a significant role in both the generation and conversion of electrical power for a wide range of energy applications. While our energy technologies continue to be modernized, soft magnetic materials in power electronics need to offer excellent performance under high switching frequencies which current existing soft magnetic materials struggle with. There is a clear need for developing novel soft magnetic materials that can keep up with our ever-evolving technologies. Additive manufacturing (AM) serves as a useful processing technique for easily testing and optimizing different novel alloy compositions and design structures with low processing costs. Research on AM of soft magnetic materials is still quite nascent but recent studies have demonstrated that laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) techniques were effective in producing components with high density and desirable magnetic properties. In this work, the effects of processing by LPBF on the microstructure and magnetic properties of the medium entropy alloy (MEA) Fe₄₀Co₃₀Mn₁₅Al₁₅ were investigated. The behavior of the AM-processed samples will be compared to its as-cast counterpart, which has excellent soft magnetic properties. The microstructure was analyzed using x-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive spectroscopy and electron backscatter diffraction, while the magnetic properties were determined using vibrating sample magnetometry. This study investigated the correlation between the processing parameters and the degree of porosity, grain size, and magnetic properties.