Projects

Summary

The transition towards cleaner energy and more sustainable mobility is key for Europe in meeting the goals set out by the European Green Deal. However, this transition depends on critical raw materials such as rare earths, 90% of which are imported from China, and which gives rise to vulnerability in strategic sectors such as renewable energies and electric vehicles.  

MagNEO seeks to develop a new generation of sustainable permanent magnets that are free of rare earths, thus reducing dependence on materials such as neodymium and praseodymium and fostering a more autonomous and sustainable European supply chain. 

Objective

Obtain robust and sustainable permanent magnets without rare earth elements for energy and mobility applications.  The project combines new AlNiCo and high-entropy alloy combinations with additive manufacturing, using modelling, automatic learning, experimental selection, fast characterisation, microstructure optimisation and magnet geometry, along with an improvement in thermal treatment.  The end goal is to create anisotropic microstructures with greater coercivity and maximum magnetic energy product levels ((BH)max) which are higher than current ones. 

Ceit’s role

Ceit provides its proven track record in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations with a view to optimising the gas atomisation process that produces the metal powders needed for the additive manufacturing of new magnets. It designs and tests different conditions and components in order to obtain high-quality and highly efficient powders, thus ensuring the scalable industrial manufacture of MagNEO sustainable magnets.