APPLICATION OF HIGH MAGNETIC FIELDS IN MATERIALS PROCESSING

Abstract

In the metal industry, electrical energy has long been used as heat energy due to its cleanliness, high controllability and high energy density. Technologies using electric energy were developed rather early and progressed without a background of sufficient scientific understanding. Good examples of this are electromagnetic levitation and electromagnetic mixing that were already invented in 1923 and 1932, respectively. To bridge the gap between technology and scientific understanding, magnetohydrodynamics which had been established by Alfven in 1942, was first introduced in 1982 at the IUTAM Conference titled “The Application of Magnetohydrodynamics to Metallurgy”, held in Cambridge, England. The conference may have initiated many people into the field of Electromagnetic Processing of Materials (EPM), though the term “EPM” was first formally used at the initial Symposium of EPM held in Nagoya, Japan in 1994. EPM research has been hitherto devoted to the economics of mass production, and nanotechnology in relation to high quality materials. Today, EPM involves both Lorentz and magnetic forces relating to high magnetic fields.