Molycorp, Inc. will transition its Mountain Pass rare earth facility to a “care and maintenance” mode while it plans to continue serving its rare earth oxide customers via its production facilities in Estonia and China. Customers of the company’s magnetic materials and rare earth-based water treatment products will not be impacted. Rare earth production at…

Karl A. Gschneidner and fellow scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory have created a new magnetic alloy that is an alternative to traditional rare-earth permanent magnets. The new alloy—a potential replacement for high-performance permanent magnets found in automobile engines and wind turbines–eliminates the use of one of the scarcest and costliest rare…

  Increasing demand and a shrinking supply of rare-earth elements for magnets creates an opportunity for a research team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Minnesota. The goal is to create a recipe for a replacement that doesn’t use scarce ingredients. The prospect of not having enough rare earth elements such as…

Developer of MagNet says its Version 7, available mid-spring 2010, will let users simulate the magnetization of a permanent magnet, expand on MagNet’s multicore support, and include other new features. V7.1, from Infolytica Corp., will allow simulating and determine the magnetic field strength inside the permanent magnet component by the magnetization pattern and source current…