BARC develops technology to make strategic magnets

Chennai: The indigenous effort to produce a strategic magnet— called Rare Earth Permanent Magnet (REPM) got a boost with the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) developing a new technology that could meet India’s domestic requirements of REPM with greater ease henceforth.

With India being a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the availability of REPM magnets used in a variety of strategic and non-strategic applications, though currently met by imports, “has been scarce to the country”. Hence, there is a need to indigenously make REPMs’.

Rare Earth (RE) magnets, such as samarium-cobalt, find use in atomic energy, space and defence industries and “are becoming increasingly indispensable components” in high power motors, micro motors, and bearings among others.”

While the public sector Indian Rare Earths Limited (IREL) has set up facilities for producing “separated high pure RE oxides” that are used in the production of the REPMs’, the BARC said it has “developed a novel metallurgical process for making RE alloy powder using indigenous RE oxides prepared by IREL.

The technology for converting the RE alloys to magnets is “available with the Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory (DMRL),” at Hyderabad, the BARC said in a statement. The magnets “are then machined at BARC, magnetised and characterised for the required application,” it explained.

The new process developed by BARC “yields the alloy powders directly from inexpensive oxides at much lower temperatures, thereby resulting in lower cost magnets made out of samarium available in Indian ore,” the statement said.

The ‘RE alloy powders’ thus prepared by using BARC technology could be eminently converted to magnets by DMRL. Based on these indigenous efforts, the IREL was now considering setting up a plant for production of REPMs’ for use in the strategic sectors. BARC “is now transferring the technology to IREL,” for the purpose, it added.

Dr R.K. Sinha, Atomic Energy Commission chairman, Dr Sekhar Basu, BARC director, Dr S V. Kamat, DMRL (Hyderabad) director, Dr S. Pandian, DMRL, Hyderabad, Dr R.N. Patra, IREL’s chief and Dr J.K. Chakravarty, director, Minerals group, BARC, were among those present on the occasion, the BARC statement added.