Permanent Magnet Materials and Their Application

This book is a comprehensive design text for permanent magnets and their application. Permanent magnets are very important industrially, and are widely used in a variety of applications, including industrial drives, consumer products, computers and automobiles. In the early 1970s a new class of magnet - the rare earths - was discovered, the properties of which showed sustained improvement over the following two decades. New materials such as these have spawned many new markets for magnets, with significant performance gains in the devices for which they are used. By the early 1990s the new magnet technologies had matured. Until the advent of the present book, however, there has been no text that unified all the relevant information on the wide range of modern permanent magnet materials. This book, therefore, has been written as a comprehensive review of the technology, intended for scientists and engineers involved in all stages of the manufacture, design and use of magnets. A brief theory of magnetism explains the behaviour of the different classes of permanent magnet, and the various production processes that lead to quite diverse material characteristics. The core of the book is a detailed treatment of the methods that are used to design permanent magnets, including assessments of the changes they experience under practical operating conditions. Modern analytical techniques are described, including the finite element method, with reference to the accurate simulation of permanent magnet materials. With the evolution of new materials, the markets for permanent magnets have changed. In this book, the author emphasizes the most important modern applications, and discusses the viabilityof the various magnet types that are now available. This book, the first to cover comprehensively all aspects of modern permanent magnet materials, their design and application, will be of value to anyone involved in the design and use of magnets.