![]() ![]() In addition to trying to invent magnets that don't depend as heavily on rare earth elements, mining companies are trying to harvest new supplies. Now, Hadjipanayis and researchers at GE and the Ames Laboratory in Iowa are trying to create magnets that are nearly twice that strong. "If you're an ordinary person, you can't separate them" by pulling, he said. But if two neodymium magnets get stuck together, "you have to slice it into two parts." Hadjipanayis was able to free himself from that situation. He walked past a metal object near security, he said, and got temporarily stuck. Several years ago, Hadjipanayis recalls going to an airport with a neodymium magnet tucked away in his coat pocket. Scientists measure the strength of magnets with a unit called the "maximum energy product." A typical refrigerator magnet has a rating of 3 or 4.Ĭurrent neodymium magnets register 57 to 60. He keeps several of these nickel-sized magnets on his desks to show visitors. "For me, that was kind of a very exciting experience," Hadjipanayis said. The unexpected result: He discovered the neodymium-iron-boron magnet, which was far stronger than anything that preceded it. He thought boron might do for this metallic solution what eggs and milk do for cake batter. Hadjipanayis didn't know that boron was the missing ingredient when he asked his lab assistant to add that gas to the metallic mixture they were working with.Īll he knew was that the experiments were going wrong because the metal kept crumbling and falling apart. "They are very unique elements, and the science of them is fascinating," Johnson said. And if the shape of those crystals is just right, all of the super-powerful springs align, and - bam! - the springs amplify each other, and you have the very powerful magnet. ![]() Something magical happens when a rare earth element like neodymium is combined with specific other elements: They form crystals. To keep that metaphor going, a typical rare earth element is full of super-powerful springs, but they're all jumbled up, facing various directions as if they'd been thrown onto the floor of a closet. "In a magnetic material, the magnetic ions are connected by springs." Understanding precisely why this is the case would require graduate degrees in both chemistry and physics, but the for-dummies version goes something like this, according to Frank Johnson, a materials scientist at GE Global Research: ![]() Rare earth elements possess strange magnetic and conductive properties aren't found anywhere else in our cabinet of elements. ![]() We have the concept here, but there are many, many obstacles that we need to resolve before we succeed." I mean, you need also a little bit of luck. He's trying to recreate the accidental success he had with magnets in the 1980s. And they're trying to do it by using as little neodymium as possible, since that element is getting harder to come by.įor Hadjipanayis, this is a professional as well as personal struggle. They're in a race to make an even stronger magnet than before - an essential component in green technologies, which use magnets to transfer electrical energy into motion. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory in Iowa and GE Global Research in upstate New York, are preparing for that day. Hadjipanayis, chairman of physics at the University of Delaware, and researchers from two other institutions, the U.S. What would happen to our technological landscape without these rare earths? Throw in the fact that rare earth elements are important to all kinds of technologies - they're the reason smartphones vibrate, why TVs have vivid reds and greens, and how computer hard drives are able to etch data - and you've got a recipe that scares many technologists and researchers. mine for rare earth elements went out of production after a radioactive waste accident in the 1990s. China, which controls supplies of 97% of these materials, doesn't like sharing them with the West. That magnet would help revolutionize technology, powering wind turbine motors and giving juice to electric cars.Īccessible supplies of neodymium and 16 other rare earth elements - which occupy those two orphaned rows at the bottom of the periodic table - are running short. Nothing was wrong, though, and Hadjipanayis soon realized that his team accidentally had created what was then, and continues to be, the world's strongest magnet - made of a strange and little understood "rare earth" element called neodymium. "You have something wrong go back" and try the experiment again. "You're out of your mind," Hadjipanayis recalls telling him in the early 1980s. (CNN) - George Hadjipanayis' assistant came to him with perplexing news: Some incredibly strong magnetic field had caused their lab instruments to go haywire. ![]()
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