Applied research on amorphous magnetic materials

Amorphous magnetic materials are increasingly becoming an industrial reality, with a variety of applications to electronics and electrical engineering. Many research lines are in progress for what concerns the production techniques, the understanding of the structure and properties of amorphous ribbons, the optimization and extension of their applications. The fast quenching methods used to obtain amorphous materials will first be reviewed, also describing an experimental apparatus set up by the authors for laboratory investigations of rapid solidification processes. Becauses of the non equilibrium structure of amorphous metallic alloys, various relaxation effects are expected to occur, which may partially limit the use of these materials. Studies of these relaxation phenomena, performed by different methods, including Mossbauer spectroscopy will also be reviewed, showing their importance in better understanding the amorphous structure. Finally much attention will be devoted to actual applications of amorphous magnetic materials. Emphasis will be placed on the prospective applications of amorphous ribbons characterized by very low power losses to magnetic cores of distribution transformers, pointing to the possible advantages, but also to the technical problems involved with the substitution of crystalline laminations with the new amorphous materials.