The influence of carbon and oxygen on the magnetic characteristics of press-less sintered NdFeB magnets

The Pressless Process (PLP) was adopted to manufacture NdFeB sintered magnets, where the investigations on carbon and oxygen residues from heptane milling liquid media and graphite crucibles used for sintering were quantified to evaluate the influence on the magnetic characteristics. The carbon and oxygen content in the magnets produced from wet ball milling of strip cast flakes was found to be of the order 104 ppm and 4·104 ppm respectively, which resulted in soft magnetic behavior. However using jet milling the carbon and oxygen concentration were decreased by an order of magnitude resulting in coercivity of up to 829 kA/m. Thus the influence of the carbon from the graphite crucibles is small.