It is well known that in 1970's rare-earth-cobalt magnets have made a marvelous progress in magnet characteristics of practical permanent magnet materials. Early in the development of the new materials much efforts have been focused on an intermetallic compound of SmCo
5 with a very high anisotropy constant, resulting in a successful establishment of production methods of the so-called 1-5 type magnet. Later in 1970's a new development of post-1-5 magnets has commenced to achieve a higher energy product. The guiding princple is to improve their chemical compositions to allow the remanence to exceed that of the 1-5 magnet, as well as to keep the coercivity at a reasonably high level. Recently several kinds of new magnets have been successfully developed whose compositions have been expressed as Sm (Co, TM)
z, where z is an appropriate number more than 5, and TM means one or more transition elements involving Cu, Fe, Ti, Mn, Cr, Zr, Ta, Hf, etc. Since the z number has been gradually increased up to 8.5, they are often called as 2-17 type magnets. At present, however, the 2-17 type magnets show a wide variety in the compositions as well as in the mechanism of coercivity. Particularly from a viewpoint of a feature of magnetization curves, it seems likely that they might well be classified into two groups; a nucleation-controlled type and pinning-controlled one. Nevertheless, a detailed explanation of the coercivity mechanism and further seeking for the most desirable composition will be the most important problems on the 2-17 type magnets with futures.
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