Magnetomechanical behaviors of giant magnetostrictive materials

Abstract

The Laves phase alloy Tb-Dy-Fe, commercially known as Terfenol-D, exhibits the giant room-temperature magnetostriction at moderate field strength of a few kOe due to its combination of high magnetostriction and low magnetocrystalline anisotropic energy. Thus, this pseudobinary rare earth iron compound has found quite a number of applications such as in magnetomechanical transducers, actuators and adaptive vibration control systems. The simultaneous measurements of magnetostriction and magnetization at various fixed compressive pre-stresses applied in the axial direction for Tb_0.3Dy_0.7Fe_1.95 samples are presented. The results show that the magnetostriction increases with increasing compressive stress until it reaches 1742 × 10⁶ under 25 MPa, so does the coercive magnetic field. And the hysteresis loop area for magnetization and magnetostriction also increases with the increment of applied compressive stresses. But the maximum magnetic susceptibility χ(dM/dH) is obtained under zero stress field and the strain derivative dλ/dH increases to the highest amplitude of 0.039 × 10⁻⁶ A⁻¹m at a stress level of 5 MPa. In the strain versus magnetization intensity curve, the initial flat stage mainly consisting of a 180° domain wall motion becomes shorter with increasing stress. It means more initial domains are driven to the transversal direction under the compressive stress before magnetization, which is consistent with the improvement of the magnetostriction.