Applications

Abstract

The production of ferro- and ferrimagnetic materials is a large-scale operation, measured in quantity as well as in currency. (This is in contrast to the products of the computer industry, where the price of the material which goes into a chip is a minute fraction of the device fabrication cost.) As an example, the annual sales of so-called electrical steel, used for electromotors and similar devices, reach the millions of tons and their market values are in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Other large-scale production items are permanent magnets for loudspeakers, etc., or magnetic recording materials. The following sections will give some impression about the technology (i.e., mostly materials science) which has been developed to improve the properties of magnetic materials.