Amorphous materials — A new class of soft magnetic alloys

The key events in the development of amorphous alloys are briefly summarized within the context of applying them as soft magnetic alloys. Some of their pertinent magnetic properties, such as saturation magnetization, losses, exciting current, permeability and stress sensitivity are reviewed and compared with conventional alloys. New results on iron-rich alloys will be presented. We have recently discovered that increasing the diameter of the toroid prepared from narrow tapes produces a remarkable improvement in the magnetic properties attributable to the decreasing contribution of stress induced ordering. The losses become significantly less than the best results reported for the Permalloys and are much less than 1/10 the losses of Fe−3.2% Si.