Additive Manufacturing of High Performance Ferromagnetic Materials

Improving the efficiency, as well as reducing size of electrical machines, can reduce the amount and types of pollutants we emit into our environment; however, manufacturing realities often bottleneck the production of new low-cost and highly efficient motor designs. Additive manufacturing technologies provide flexibility to overcome limitations of the subtractive and powder metallurgical processes. In this paper, the magnetic characteristics of 3D printed iron silicon samples are compared with prototype soft magnetic composite material. Binder jet printing technology is used to prepare the iron silicon samples and its magnetic properties are experimentally extracted. It is shown that magnetic permeability of the 3D printed sample is higher than prototype soft magnetic composite.