[EVDL List]

Check out the new [last decade or so?] neodymium-iron-boron
supermagnets. These are incredibly strong.
A magnet of 2 square inch and 0.5 inch thickness has 65 pounds
of pull! Save your old hard drives, those NFB magnets are good for
wind turbines, electric motors, generators, etc.

And theres probably better magnets out there waiting to be created-
100 elements in the game gives 100*99*98 ~ 1,000,000 possibilities
just for possible combinations of 3 elements. Then consider the mix ratios can
vary , and you get an incredible number of possible compounds
only a small number of which have been checked.
The neodymium magnet for example is Nd2Fe14B . If you took 14 atoms
per unitcell as the maximum to try, then the million possibilites for 3
elements
is multiplied by 14 for each element, reaching some 2.7 billion
possibilities.

Its exciting times for material science since the computers are getting into
the range where you can do a full-on simulation [quantum-korrect] of a material
instead of cooking it up - but just barely [a few tens of atoms].

>Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 15:21:57 -0500
>From: Lee Hart <[email protected]>

>>Jack Murray wrote:
>> What someone needs to figure out is how to make
>> lightweight materials magnetic, that would be a huge
>> revolution.

>Iron, nickel, and cobalt are the only useful magnetic elements at room
>temperature. They get alloyed with other elements for various reasons,
>but anything used for its magnetic properties will have a high
>percentage of these elements. They are all fairly dense. Obviously, iron
>is used the most because it is the cheapest.

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