Characterization and amorphous phase formation of mechanically alloyed Co60Fe5Ni5Ti25B5 powders

Abstract

In this work, the multicomponent Co60Fe5Ni5Ti25B5 (at.%) alloy powders were synthesized from commercially available pure elemental powders by using a mechanical alloying (MA) process under argon gas atmosphere. The changes in structural, morphological, thermal and magnetic properties of the processed powders during MA were examined by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM/EDX), differential thermal analysis (DTA) and vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM). The results showed that the amorphization occurred after 3.5 h of milling, and the amorphous phase was stable up to 580 °C, where crystallization occurred. The SEM observations indicated that different morphologies were obtained during the MA stages. In addition, the EDX mapping confirmed the uniform distribution of elemental content. Magnetic results indicated that all the samples exhibited soft-ferromagnetic behavior. The evolution of the saturation magnetization (Ms), the coercivity (Hc) and the squareness ratio (Ms/Mr) during milling process were discussed with respect to microstructural changes. The influence of the annealing on magnetic hysteresis was also studied. The Ms, Hc and Ms/Mr values of about 53.4 emu/g, 7.6 Oe and 0.01, respectively was obtained after 7 h of milling.