Earlier today, Molycorp announced that Dr. Stanley Trout will join the company as its Director of Magnet Manufacturing, effective October 1, 2010. Stan has been a successful consultant in the magnet industry for the past ten years, under the banner of his Spontaneous Materials consulting business. He previously worked for a number of magnet companies in the [...]

Late last week the US Department of Energy [DoE] awarded $9.6 million in grants for six Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy [ARPA-E] projects as a means to “accelerate innovation in clean energy technologies, increase America’s competitiveness and create jobs”. Notable among the grants was a $2.25 million grant to GE Global Research, of Niskayuna, NY, for [...]

Later this week I’ll be flying out to Europe, ahead of the 21st International Workshop on Rare Earth Permanent Magnets and their Applications – also known as REPM’10 or simply “The Workshop” within the magnet industry. This Workshop will be held on the shores of the picturesque Lake Bled in Slovenia, and is the latest in [...]

Huntsville, AL – August 4, 2010 – Correlated Magnetics Research (CMR) is pleased to announce that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has continued to allow CMR patent claims at a remarkable pace. Since late January, CMR has had 40 patents allowed of which 13 have already issued, with an average time to [...]

Progress in the development of commercially-viable direct drive wind turbines took a significant step forward last week, with the official launch by Siemens Energy of its SWT-3.0-101 wind turbine. This turbine has a faceplate rating of 3 MW, has no gearbox and uses a permanent magnet generator to produce electricity. What’s really interesting about this system [...]

Last month I attended the Magnetics 2010 Conference in Florida, where a variety of speakers gave updates on the business and technical side of the magnetics industry. One of these days I’ll actually write up my thoughts on the conference itself, probably in conjunction with my RareMetalBlog parter in crime, Ian London. In the meantime, [...]

In 1984, the magnetic materials research community in Europe was at a formidable crossroads. The latter part of 1983 had seen industrial research groups in the USA and Japan simultaneously announce the discovery of a promising new permanent magnet material, based on the neodymium-iron-boron [Nd-Fe-B] alloy system. This long-sought successor to the ever more expensive [...]

Earlier this week, MIT’s Technology Review published a story on a new magnetic tape material which, combined with a novel tape-reading technology, can produce data storage capacities of 35 Tb per cartridge – over 40 times higher than current tape storage systems. The research was conducted at IBM’S Zurich Research Labs in Switzerland, in conjunction [...]

You may recall an article I wrote late last year on Correlated Magnetics Research, a company from Alabama who has created and produced what they were calling “programmable” magnets. Since then, I’ve had the chance to play with a number of their prototypes.  I had initially been a little confused as to what the technology [...]