Thermal aging effects on magnetisation reversals in a pre-deformed Fe-1wt%Cu alloy studied via first-order reversal curves

ABSTRACT

We report the results of measurements of first-order reversal curves (FORCs) for a thermally aged Fe-1wt%Cu alloy with different levels of rolling reduction. We find that the FORC distribution has a peak at high switching and interaction fields for samples with high rolling reductions and that this peak rapidly shifts towards lower fields after aging, which is associated with a narrowing of the peak. Conversely, after aging for more than 10,000 min, the peak exhibits an additional shift towards higher fields, which is associated with a broadening of the peak. These results indicate that both the microstructural homogeneity and the material hardening changes during thermal aging in a competitive way due to recovery and Cu precipitation, which is consistent with small-angle and wide-angle neutron scattering data.

KEYWORDS:

• Magnetic hysteresis
• Fe–Cu alloy
• thermal aging
• neutron scattering
• precipitate

Acknowledgements

SK would like to thank Dr Yojiro Oba at Japan Atomic Energy Agency for fruitful discussion about SANS data analysis. The neutron experiment at the MLF of the J-PARC was performed under a user program (proposal no. 2017B0129).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) (grant no. 25289346) from JSPS, Japan.