Now here is an interesting idea – making very high strength magnets from boring old iron and nitrogen instead of exotic rare-earth elements.
Today’s world depends on rare-earth magnets, from automobiles to computers to fighter jets. While rare-earth elements are not rare, extracting them with current technology is a messy process which only China has been prepared to do on the necessary large scale – the same China which has now put an embargo on exporting the finished rare-earth metals.
Making high strength magnets from readily available iron & nitrogen would make a substantial improvement to the environment and to economic security – unless Western countries decided to go for short-term profits and offshored all the manufacturing to China.
Iron Nitrides: Powerful Magnets Without The Rare Earth Elements | Hackaday
"… Iron nitrides are nothing new. Nitriding processes, such as gas nitriding by exposing heated steel to ammonia, have been used for steel finishing for more than a century. The more complex iron nitride α”-Fe16N2 was first discovered in 1951; its magnetic properties were explored in the early 1970s and again in the 1990s as part of the search for new and better heads for hard drives and other magnetic recording media.
This alloy showed promise in magnetics but proved difficult enough to work with that results weren’t easily reproducible, so interest in α”-Fe16N2 waned until the late 2000s, when methods of producing thin films of the material were developed. These experiments showed that these films may have two to three times the magnetic energy product, a key measurement in determining the strength of a magnet, than neodymium magnets. Along with all the other properties that have been discovered, this makes iron nitride an excellent candidate for a new kind of magnet without rare earth elements. …"