High-efficient selected area grain boundary diffusion for enhancing the coercivity of thick Nd-Fe-B magnets

Grain boundary diffusion (GBD) is an effective approach for improving the coercivity of Nd-Fe-B magnets with less heavy rare earth consumption. However, it generally only works well for thin magnets since the infiltration depth of diffusion source is limited. Here, a GBD approach that mainly diffuses the source from the edge and corner areas of the magnet, named selected area GBD (SAGBD), is proposed for treating thick magnets. After diffusing Pr-Tb-Al-Cu alloy by SAGBD, the coercivity of a 12-mm thick magnet was increased from 1070 to 1675 kA/m. By this approach, the coercivity enhancement with 1 wt. % Tb was 465 kA·m−1, 1.6 times as much as that by diffusion from two easy magnetization planes. For achieving a coercivity enhancement of ∼600 kA/m, the thickness of treated magnet was increased by 4 mm. Although the diffusion from six planes can further increase the coercivity, SAGBD leads to high efficient use of Tb and less reduction of remanence. The microstructure characterizations and micromagnetic simulation demonstrated that the edges and corners are magnetic “weak” areas of the magnet, and SAGBD can effectively hinder the nucleation of reversed domains in these places and the rapid reversal propagation in whole magnet. The present approach is important for the high-efficient use of the diffusion source and the fabrication of large-size Nd-Fe-B products with high stability.