UD wins $4.4 million to develop next-generati...( The University of Delaware has won a...)

The University of Delaware has won a $4.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) to lead a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research project to develop the next generation of high-performance permanent magnets.

Stronger magnets are essential for increasing the energy efficiency of electronics, automobiles, information technology, and communications systems in the 21st-century, and for supporting the development of hybrid/electric vehicles, wind turbines, environmentally friendly transportation systems, and new energy storage systems, among other applications.

The UD project is one of 37 selected nationwide by the agency, collectively totaling $151 million, which "have great potential to revolutionize the U.S. energy sector," according to Shane Kosinski, ARPA-E's acting deputy director. They represent the first round of projects funded under ARPA-E, which is receiving $400 million to deploy under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

George Hadjipanayis, the Richard B. Murray Professor of Physics and chairperson of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Delaware, is the principal investigator on the project. He will coordinate a team of chemists, material scientists, physicists, and engineers from the University of Delaware, University of Nebraska, Northeastern University, and Virginia Commonwealth University; the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University, in Ames, Iowa; and the Electron Energy Corporation in Landisville, Pa.

According to Hadjipanayis, the strongest permanent magnets today are made from an alloy of three elements: neodymium (Nd), iron (Fe), and boron (B). Hadjipanayis was one of the three researchers who discovered the Nd-Fe-B magnets in the early 1980s.

In the new project, he and his team will be working to identify new materials that will result in magnets twice as strong as those cu
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