Every year, billions of euros worth of electrical energy are wasted world-wide, due to the suboptimal properties of the materials used
as magnetic components in power electronics (electric machines such as transformers, motors or generators). The magnetic material
that is most often used for this purpose is an iron-silicon electrical steel grade with about 3 wt.% silicon content. It has been known
since long that increasing the silicon content to 6.5 wt.% would be much better. Electric machines could be built that are lighter,
more compact and more energy efficient. The reason why this has not become reality yet, is that steels with that amount of silicon
are too brittle to be used in actual devices. The recent literature shows promising examples where electrical steel with a larger silicon
content have been made, while avoiding the brittleness. This is done by alloying Fe-Si with additional elements, and by post-
processing the steel in particular ways. There are many degrees of freedom for doing so, and the literature reports only isolated and
fragmented results. Moreover, most of the successful procedures are not suitable to scale them up to an industrial production. And
insight in the mechanisms behind the observed behaviour is lacking, in particular about the relation between the order-disorder
transition in Fe-Si and the onset of brittleness. In this project we propose to study the alloying and processing of Fe-Si in a systematic
way, by a complementary arsenal of rolling techniques, global and local characterization methods and ab initio simulations. The
results of this project will allow steel makers to devise production and processing procedures to make superior electrical steel grades