Ian Baker1,Youxiong Ye1,Scott Lish1,Liubin Xu2,Si Chen3,Yang Ren3,Aparna Saksena4,Baptiste Gault5,Markus Wittman1,Haixuan Xu2
Dartmouth College1,The University of Tennessee, Knoxville2,Argonne National Laboratory3,Max Planck Strabe 14,Imperial College London5
Ian Baker1,Youxiong Ye1,Scott Lish1,Liubin Xu2,Si Chen3,Yang Ren3,Aparna Saksena4,Baptiste Gault5,Markus Wittman1,Haixuan Xu2
Dartmouth College1,The University of Tennessee, Knoxville2,Argonne National Laboratory3,Max Planck Strabe 14,Imperial College London5
Soft magnets play a vital role in the efficient energy conversion in a variety of important industries including wide-bandgap semiconductors, electric vehicles, aeronautics and aerospace, particularly at high temperatures. Improving the efficiency of modern power electronics and electrical machines via advanced soft magnets has the potential to significantly contribute to global energy savings, thereby leading to a reduction of the associated carbon footprint. Here, we present microstructural characterization and property measurements on two novel FeCoMnAl alloys, one single-phase B2 and one nanostructured B2 + b.c.c., which have good soft magnetic properties up to ~873 K. Both alloys exhibits a high saturation magnetizations, high Curie temperatures, low coercivities, and high electrical resistivities. TEM-based ALCHEMI analysis showed that in the B2 phase the Al atoms preferentially occupy one sublattice site whereas the other elements tend to partition between both sublattice sites. DFT calculations predict magnetic properties consistent with the experimental results and indicate that Fe, Co, and Mn elements predominately contribute to the ferromagnetism.