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Effects of gas nitridation on microstructures and magnetic properties of Fe3N/Fe soft magnetic composites

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Abstract

Fe3N/Fe soft magnetic composites (SMCs) are a kind of promising materials with excellent magnetic properties. In this work, Fe3N/Fe core-shell particles are prepared by gas nitriding and then pressed into Fe3N/Fe SMCs. The Fe3N phase increases with the nitriding time, resulting in the decrease of saturation magnetization and the increase of remanence and coercivity. The saturation magnetization and coercivity of the 5 h nitridated sample are 87.8 emu/g and 13.2Oe, respectively, and the product is identified to be pure Fe3N phase. The effective permeability firstly decreases and then increases with the nitridation time. The 5-h nitriding sample shows the best frequency stability, and its permeability decreases from 14.2 at 20 kHz to 4.3 at 590 kHz in a 4mT magnetic field. The core loss, especially eddy current loss, of Fe3N/Fe SMCs is obviously decreased with Fe3N content. The results show that the properties of soft magnetic composites at high frequency can be improved significantly by nitriding treatment.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the support and guidance provided by College of Materials and Chemistry, China Jiliang University, Hangzhou 310018, China.

Funding

This work was supported by Zhejiang Province Public Welfare Technology Application Research Project (LGG22E010001, LGG19E010002), Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (LY20E020011), Key R&D Program of Zhejiang Province of China (2020C01008), and National Natural Science Foundation of China (U1809216).

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MG contributed to resources, writing - original draft, and writing - review & editing. XP contributed to project administration, supervision, and funding acquisition. JL contributed to writing - review & editing and funding acquisition. YY, HG, and HJ contributed to funding acquisition. JX contributed to resources. BH contributed to resources and writing - review & editing. DJ, TE, and XW contributed to writing - review & editing.

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Correspondence to Xiaoling Peng or Jing Li.

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Ge, M., Peng, X., Li, J. et al. Effects of gas nitridation on microstructures and magnetic properties of Fe3N/Fe soft magnetic composites. J Mater Sci: Mater Electron 33, 10287–10296 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-022-08017-y

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