Study on the coercivity of granular solid iron

The iron granular solid, in which ultrafine iron particles are dispersed, has been prepared with both SiO₂ and Cu matrices using the sol-gel method. The structure and morphology of these granular solid samples are investigated by X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) and Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM). The magnetic properties are measured using a vibrating sample magnetometer with 20 kOe maximum applied field. It is found that the coereivity decreases very slightly with temperature from 80 to 300 K for these Fe-SiO₂ and Fe-Cu granular solid samples with different average size of iron particles from 50 to 300 Å. The magnetic anisotropy has been obtained from the measured magnetization curves for these granular solid samples using the law of approach to saturation, and the obtained values of the effective magnetic anisotropy are all more than 10⁶ erg/cm³, which are larger than the value of the magnetocrystalline anisotropy for bulk iron. The coercivity vs temperature for these granular solid samples has been calculated using the Kneller and Luborsky theory, in which the magnetic anisotropy values obtained from the law of approach to saturation are used. The trends of the calculated coercivity as a function of temperature are in reasonable agreement with the observations.