Home Resources Articles

Articles & Research

Notes from the bench.

Plain-language explainers, design references, and published research from the engineering team. Bookmark-worthy if you spec magnets often.

Industry

Recycling Rare Earth Magnet Materials

Recycling NdFeB magnets could stabilize rare-earth supply and cut mining impact — but coatings, logistics, and quality standards still make it a young, costly industry.

Read article

Materials

Elemental Iron (Fe): The Fundamental Magnetic Element

Iron is the foundation of magnetic science: where ferromagnetism comes from, why interatomic alignment matters, and the role of the Curie temperature.

Read article

Engineering reference

Magnetic 3D Mapping Systems

Inside the custom 3D field mappers SM Magnetics uses — from the Brockhaus 460 to the Senis MMS-1A-RS — and how the data drives design, validation, and final…

Read article

Materials

Soft Magnetic Materials: Introduction and Applications — Part 1

Why "soft" describes magnetic behavior, not mechanical hardness — and how soft magnets quietly power motors, transformers, sensors, and almost every appliance you own.

Read article

Materials

Soft Magnetic Materials: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) — Part 2

How to read a B-H curve and which KPIs — coercivity, saturation, permeability, resistivity, magnetostriction, Curie temperature — actually drive soft magnetic performance.

Read article

Materials

Soft Magnetic Materials: Current Availability on the Market — Part 3

Iron, Fe-Si, Permalloy, Fe-Co, amorphous and nanocrystalline alloys, SMCs, and ferrites — a market guide showing why no single soft magnetic material wins everywhere.

Read article

Engineering reference

Insights on Electromagnets vs Permanent Magnets

Permanent magnets win on close-distance force without power; electromagnets win on switchable, precisely controlled fields. A practical selection guide.

Read article

Industry

A Composite Magnet Solution to Improve Hard Disk Drive Performance

A Halbach-array composite magnet design delivers ~5% stronger air-gap field and 3–7% net torque gain in HDD voice coil motors versus conventional configurations.

Read article

Materials

Making a Neodymium Magnet — Eleven (Not So) Easy Steps

From raw-material recipe through strip casting, jet milling, sintering, machining, coating, and magnetizing — every step in producing a sintered NdFeB magnet.

Read article

Engineering reference

Magnetic Measurements Techniques

A practical tour of the measurement methods SM Magnetics uses every day — Helmholtz coils, hysteresisgraphs, VSMs, field mappers, force testers, and soft magnetic testers.

Read article