A team from Duke university uses computer modeling to help compile a list of materials with magnetic traces. A microscopic look at one of the new magnets made of cobalt, magnesium, and titanium (Image via Duke University)
Magnets are pretty common in our life; not just the ones on your fridge. We encounter them daily whether we realize it or not. So, you would think magnetic materials are easy to find. This isn’t the case. Magnetic materials are pretty rare – roughly five percent of known inorganic compounds show just a bit of magnetism. Even out of those, only a few dozen can be used in real-world applications. Not only are these materials difficult to find in nature, but they’re difficult to create in a lab as well. Luckily, scientists from Duke University built two new magnetic materials. How did they do it? Computer modeling.
They used computer modeling to help scale down traces of magmatism found in new materials. It cuts the previously tedious work load short since it can screen hundreds of thousands of potential materials in little time. First, the team looked to a family of materials called Heusler alloy and considered all possible arrangements and combinations. In the end, they had 236,115 prototypes to choose from.
To help whittle down the list, they built prototypes of the different combinations atom by atom in a computer model. This help narrow down the possibilities to 35,602 stable compounds. That’s still a lot to choose from, so scientists initiated more stringent tests of stability checking each compound against other atomic arrangements. This narrowed it down to 248. They did more testing and found only 22 of the 248 had some trace of magmatism. Finally, the list was down to 14 compounds.
The method was so successful, it helped create two magnetic materials that have never been seen before: one a blend of cobalt, magnesium, and titanium that is magnetic even at high temperatures. The other is a mix of manganese, palladium, and platinum, which responds to outside magnetic fields quite well.
Will these magnetic materials work in the real world? The scientists aren’t even sure themselves. But this doesn’t take away the validity of their research and results. As Stefano Curtarolo, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and director of the Center for Materials at Duke, points out where or not the new magnets are actually useful in the future doesn’t really matter. Instead, the big take away from this is the fact that they could create new magnetic material in the first place. It cuts down on the time and effort spent finding these materials or trying to recreate them in a lab. This could help scientist focus on specific magnets for certain tasks in the future.
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