Comparison of microstructure and magnetic properties of 3% Si-steel, amorphous and nanostructure Finemet

This paper presents a comparison of microstructure and magnetic properties of polycrystalline 3%Si-steel, amorphous and nano-crystalline alloy Fe73.5Cu1Nb3Si13.5B9 (known as Finemet). Si-steels are industrially produced by casting, hot and cold rolling, annealing and coating. Samples of thin amorphous ribbons were prepared by the planar flow casting (PFC) method. Nano-crystalline samples are obtained after annealing in vacuum furnace at 560 °C for 1 h. The structure of specimens was investigated by XRD, SEM and FE-SEM. Also, magnetic properties were measured using vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM). The results showed that, hysteresis losses in as-quenched and nano-crystalline ribbons were by 94.75% and 96.06% less than 3%Si-steel, respectively. After the heat treatment of amorphous specimens, hysteresis area was decreased by 25% in comparison with heat treated specimen. This decreasing is occurred due to the formation of Fe3Si nanostructure with size of 10-17 nm and removing segregation after heat treatment.