Bulk Nanocrystalline Fe84Nb4W3B9 Alloy Prepared by Super-high-pressure Consolidation from Mechanically Alloyed Powders

Amorphous and nanocrystalline Fe-based alloys are technologically important materials due to their good magnetic properties and low cost. However, the appearances of the alloys obtained by melt spinning and sputtering techniques are limited to ribbon and strip, film, wire, and powders, which largely restricts their applications in many engineering devices in which big size and arbitrary shape are often necessary. Thus, generating bulk materials with good soft magnetic properties is of great interest. In our previous work (2005), we prepared bulk amorphous and nanocrystalline FeZrNbB alloys by consolidating amorphous powders crushed from as-quenched ribbons. In this paper, our motivation is to develop effective consolidation procedures to produce bulk, full dense, nanocrystalline alloys with good soft magnetic properties from mechanically alloyed nanocrystalline powders. Nanocrystalline Fe₈₄Nb₇B₉ alloy ("Nanoperm"), which is known to exhibit excellent soft magnetic properties in the nanocrystalline state annealed from its amorphous precursor, is used extensively in commercial applications such as telecommunications, micro devices, power electronics, and so on. In present study, Fe₈₄Nb₄W₃B₉ alloy was selected to study. W element was added to modify the soft magnetic property and thermal property of FeNbB alloy according to pretests.