SBIR-STTR Award

A new class of materials called magnetic shape memory alloy, producing strain when a magnetic field induces a martensitic transformation, has reached a record high free strain of 4.5% in its short lifetime of the development. This value has surpassed the result of decades of development on magnetostrictive Tefenol-D and piezoelectric PZT materials, two major commercial actuator materials. It is also higher than the 1% of free strain obtained in the difficult grown single crystal lead manganate niobate (PMN), which recently attracted a lot of attention in DoD and actuator community. In this Phase I program Spinix Corporation proposes to search new composition of magnetic shape memory alloys for even higher free strain and higher operation temperature by a combinatorial synthesis method. This approach will produce hundreds of samples in millimeter sizes with different combinations of compositions on a single wafer. Spinix will accomplish this important material development by collaborating with pioneers of Dr. Robert O'Handley in magnetic shape memory alloy at MIT and Dr. Xiao-Dong Xiang in combinatorial synthesis of new materials at Lawrence Berkley Laboratory

The biggest challenge in implementing ferroelectric materials in the microwave frequency-agile devices is their unacceptably high loss even though the large dielectric tunability is achieved. On the other hand, the biggest barrier for employing the ferrite/superconductor frequency-agile devices is the degraded magnetic properties of ferrite at the liquid nitrogen temperature. A world wide effort, recently, is made on these problems but little progress is obtained due to the slow conventional process of optimizing the composition of ferroelectric and ferrite materials, where many iterations are desired in this trial-and-error approach an expense of funds and time could exhaust resources before a satisfactory result is obtained. In this Phase II program, Spinix, guided by the works at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, proposes a systematic materials R&D program by using a novel combinatorial method that has been proved for accelerating the materials discovery. The goals of this program are (1) to improve the tunability from 8 percent to 20 percent and switching field from 30 Oe to 5 Oe for ferrite/superconductor tunable resonator devices, and (2) to reduce the dielectric loss tano from the order of 0.01 to the order of 0.001 while maintaining the tunability of at least 20 percent.