[HN Gopher] Iron nitride permanent magnets made with DIY ball mi...
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Iron nitride permanent magnets made with DIY ball mill [video]
Author : xqcgrek2
Score : 102 points
Date : 2025-06-15 19:51 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| wolfi1 wrote:
| good luck getting ammonium nitrate without being visited by the
| police (at least here in Europe)
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| yeah, but point is more like that we do not need hard to refine
| ( that is why are they called rare earths ) materials from
| china, if those magnets were strong as neodymium ones. which
| they are not in video.
|
| --
|
| problem with chemistry is most of these things are easily made
| in garage.
|
| For example Slovak military is training disposal of homemade
| explosives / chemicals by watching NurdRage videos ;)
|
| https://youtu.be/Zybj-mi1FP0?si=KGMUJj5l5NUt2egh&t=68
|
| or this simple technology from 1890 used in different way is
| helping helping Europe to be self sufficient with energy:
|
| https://www.tue.nl/en/research/institutes/eindhoven-institut...
| nullc wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZYWpZYuRKc
| metalman wrote:
| not that big a deal, but you do have to register and have basic
| security, ammonium nitrate is by todays standards just one step
| up from black powder, and if it's a proper company with
| mechanical and chemical engineers signing off then it's
| literaly just paper work.All in all industrial type
| experimenting involves avoiding exuberant exothermic reactions
| and dramatic kinetic events, with or without an electrical
| component, just about everyone involved has a story, and there
| are plenty of injuries and fatalities. One of the hard parts of
| bootstraping any industrial process is having people who have
| the knowledge and experience to train people in how to do
| things and not get hurt, it's not "saftey" as much as survival
| skills.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > ammonium nitrate is by todays standards just one step up
| from black powder
|
| I thought that was potassium nitrate. Which I bought a bottle
| of on Amazon when I was curing a ham.
| ridgeguy wrote:
| Didn't know about the use for meat curing. I've routinely
| bought KNO3 for stump removal.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| hmmm. I have lots of stumps, and didn't use that much
| from the bottle. I think there's some old diesel in a can
| somewhere...
| Loughla wrote:
| Use aluminum powder instead. Is less messy and easier to
| set off.
|
| And it's more fun because it's more of a pop than a push.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| Farmers work with hundred kilo bags of the stuff.
| wolfi1 wrote:
| farmers yes, I wanted to cool some stuff with it, no chance
| impossiblefork wrote:
| and you can't just buy it for your garden then?
| numpad0 wrote:
| Fertilizers and a ball mill in a garage is just the
| classic direct highway route from nothing to pipe bombs,
| so there are going to be checkpoints along the way.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| What does your country use for its instant cold packs?
| lokimedes wrote:
| I love this guy. Totally living out my physicist-tinker dreams.
| showmexyz wrote:
| His videos/experiments are really really good. Some of other
| good videos-
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIqhpxul_og
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR9EN3kUlfg
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj4tRnLKN6U
| Animats wrote:
| So what happened with the startup, Niron? [1] They've been trying
| to commercialize this for years.
|
| [1] https://www.nironmagnetics.com/
| londons_explore wrote:
| The fact they don't have a 'buy one of our magnets now, $10'
| button tells me that the tech doesn't actually work.
| aredox wrote:
| The last thread of informed comments here on this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42995429
| pfdietz wrote:
| Yes, that deflated my optimism.
| ralphonzathew wrote:
| Iron nitride is much more useful as a thin film coating. Bulk
| magnet tech just isn't there.
| scythe wrote:
| The only report of a bulk Fe16N2 magnet I remember reading
| about used a 2 GPa (300 kpsi) diamond anvil to compact the
| powder. I can see why that might be economically impractical
| right now.
|
| Also there was a bombshell paper that came out claiming
| synthesis of bulk L10-FeNi which was later retracted [1] and
| may have put a temporary damper on interest in Fe16N2. It
| remains unclear which material will be available first.
|
| 1: https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/
| ad...
| kragen wrote:
| My bookmark from May 28 says:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6XIgdS1rzs #Applied-Science
| #video on #bootstrapping "insanely powerful" planetary ball mill
| grinder to make a'' iron nitride filled epoxy for magnets, which
| did work somewhat; he tested it in a 1.6-tesla vibrating sample
| magnetometer he built using a lock-in amplifier to plot its B-H
| curve.
|
| Hopefully this summary is useful to others.
|
| On the topic of alternatives to rare-earth magnets, their most
| important use is probably electrical machines (motors/generators,
| and switched reluctance electrical machines can supposedly have
| power densities comparable to rare-earth-magnet permanent-magnet
| electrical machines, and you can build them out of just punched
| electrical steel, copper or aluminum wire, and insulator, just
| like a line-frequency power transformer. (I suspect Metglas would
| work better than electrical steel, without requiring any
| strategic materials, but might be impractically expensive.) Some
| relevant bookmarks from September 22:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAhF45AtsgA #video by #Akio
| showing his Arduino-driven switched reluctance motor #electronics
| control board and working motor #hardware
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvw6k4ppUZU #video about "SynRM"
| switched reluctance motors made out of sheets with slots punched
| out to follow field lines. Low-quality AI voiceover from #Lesics.
|
| (You can actually build SRMs out of non-laminated mild steel and
| speaker wire or whatever, but I think they won't be efficient.)
|
| Another related bookmark from today:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAQexymmt64 lecture #video from
| 02012 (? or 02019?) by JR Hendershot about #switched-reluctance
| motors ("reluctance synchronous motors") mentioning ABB's new
| #SynRM product line (17-350kW), mentioning higher torque density
| than induction motors (which use the exact same stator design)
| and lower cost than permanent-magnet electrical machines as key
| advantages. Cites a price spike in neodymium as a key reason for
| interest in the area, which makes me think it's from 02012 rather
| than 02019, when it was uploaded to YouTube. It actually says
| that "reluctance synchronous" motors are _different_ from
| "switched reluctance" motors. Shows little webs in the stamping
| to hold the flux carriers together in the transversely laminated
| anisotropy rotor. Shows ABB's plot of efficiency over its product
| line, ranging from 88% at 1kW rated power up to 97.5% at 700kW,
| because of the missing ohmic losses in the rotor relative to an
| induction motor. Boglietti and Pastorelli's paper from 02008
| reports 17% higher torque for an SRM (RSM) version of an existing
| induction motor. Shows some asterisk-shaped switched-reluctance
| rotors (using higher frequencies) and contrasts with RSMs' trippy
| rotor design (using the same inverters as for an induction
| motor). Also has some nice electronics schematics. "The key to
| the improvements in efficiency and power factor lies in the
| inductance ratio or the saliency ratio in the d [direct] & q
| [quadrature] axes."
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| He's like the old "Amateur Scientist" column from _Scientific
| American_ magazine come to YouTube.
| bkraz wrote:
| I always enjoy seeing one of my videos on HN! Let me know if you
| have questions.
| pierrekin wrote:
| Not strictly related to this video - sorry about that - but I
| have some ideas of how to improve the system you used to record
| arc welding in high quality.
|
| Do you still have the hardware? Does revisiting the project and
| using some signal processing to try and extract color images
| sound like fun? I would be excited to collaborate on this if
| you had energy for it!
| bkraz wrote:
| You should definitely contact Kron Tech (makers of the system
| -- let me know if you want an introduction). I have some
| interesting image processing videos coming up -- nothing to
| do with color reconstruction, but that also sounds good. My
| project pipeline is pretty full, but I will let you know when
| I am adding new ideas.
| daveguy wrote:
| It would be interesting to compare the iron nitride magnet sample
| with an just epoxy + iron filings. I would expect iron to have
| some area between the curves because iiuc iron is able to hold a
| magnetic charge.
| bkraz wrote:
| I measured the pure iron powder as well. It shows no measurable
| area inside the BH curve, which at first seems incorrect since
| the textbook retentivity value for pure iron is fairly high.
| The textbook may be referring to a single iron magnetic domain.
| In a practical sample (even a solid piece of iron, let alone
| powder in epoxy), there are likely many magnetic domains that
| cancel each other out, and "soft iron" is used commercially for
| the very reason that is has extremely low retentivity in bulk.
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