Magnetics Business & Technology - Winter 2017 - 5

EDITOR'S CHOICE

Hitachi Will Triple Production Capacity for
Nanocrystalline Magnetic Materials
Hitachi announced in October that it plans to rapidly triple its
production capacity for the company's Finemet nanocrystalline
magnetic material due to increasing demand for soft magnetic
materials that offer high performance at high frequencies. Market pressure to produce smaller and lighter power supply circuits
for electric vehicles, railways, and renewable energy systems has
been driven by higher switching frequencies boosting the performance of power semiconductors, the company said.
Hitachi Metals has focused on the further expansion of its specialty steels business to automobile-related fields particularly for
electric vehicles as a key growth strategy. In recent years, the
company explained, reduction in the size and weight of power
supply circuits, the growing performance of next-generation
semiconductors such as silicon carbide and gallium nitride semiconductors have necessitated products with a larger capacity
and higher switching frequency than before.
However, transformers and reactors using electrical steel have
a higher core loss in the high-frequency ranges, and suppression of the temperature rise caused by this loss makes it difficult
to downsize the system. Downsizing and spacesaving design will
also generate noise in the high-frequency ranges that cannot be

suppressed by conventional products. Against this background
and amid the surging demand for electric vehicles and other
new products, the properties of Finemet including both its high
magnetic permeability and flux density, are receiving widespread
attention for many applications such as transformers, reactors,
and chokes for noise filters, the company said.
Hitachi plans to accomplish the expansion by boosting is production lines to the new level by the end of its 2018 fiscal year.

C.N.R. Rao Awarded the Materials Research
Society's Highest Honor
The Von Hippel Award, the Materials Research Society's (MRS)
highest honor, will be presented to C.N.R. Rao, Jawaharlal Nehru
Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. Rao is being recognized
"for his immense interdisciplinary contributions to the development of novel functional materials, including magnetic and
electronic properties of transition metal oxides, nanomaterials
such as fullerenes, graphene and 2D inorganic solids, superconductivity and colossal magnetoresistance in rare-earth cuprates
and manganates." Conferred annually, the Von Hippel Award
recognizes those qualities most prized by materials scientists and
engineers-brilliance and originality of intellect, combined wit-

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vision that transcends the boundaries of conventional scientific
disciplines, as exemplified by the life of Arthur von Hippel.
Rao will accept the honor during the Awards Ceremony of the
2017 MRS Fall Meeting in Boston on November 29. There, he will
present his award lecture, Glimpses of Six Decades of Research
in Materials Chemistry.
Rao is one of the world's foremost solid-state and materials
chemists, having contributed to the development of the field for
over five decades. His work on transition metal oxides has led
to basic understanding of novel phenomena and the relationship between materials properties and the structural chemistry
of these materials.
Rao was one of the earliest to synthesize 2D oxide materials
such as La2CuO4. His work has led to a systematic study of compositionally controlled metal-insulator transitions. Such studies
have had a profound impact in application fields such as colossal magnetoresistance and high-temperature superconductivity.
Oxide semiconductors hold unusual promise. In addition to his
work on hybrid materials, over the past two decades he has also
made immense contributions to the field of nanomaterials.
Rao is currently the Linus Pauling Research Professor at the
Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore, which he founded in 1989. He was appointed Chair of
the Scientific Advisory Council to the Indian Prime Minister in
January 2005, a position which he had occupied earlier, from
1985-1989. He is also the director of the International Centre
for Materials Science (ICMS) and serves on the board of the Science Initiative Group. He shares co-authorship of around 1500
research papers and has co-authored and edited 45 books.
About the Materials Research Society
MRS is an international organization of almost 14,000 materials researchers from academia, industry and government, and a
recognized leader in promoting the advancement of interdisciplinary materials research and technology to improve the quality
of life. MRS members are engaged and enthusiastic professionals
hailing from physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and engineering-the full spectrum of materials research. Headquartered in Warrendale, Pennsylvania (USA), MRS membership now
spans over 90 countries, with more than
46 percent of members residing outside
the United States. In
addition to its communications
and
publications portfolio, MRS organizes
high-quality scientific
meetings, attracting
over 13,000 attendees annually and facilitating interactions
among a wide range
of experts from the
cutting edge of the
global materials community. MRS is also a recognized leader in
education outreach and advocacy for scientific research. More
information about the Materials Research Society can be found
on its website, www.mrs.org.

Winter 2017* Magnetics Business & Technology

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