£8 million project explores new route to rare-earth-free magnets

Leeds researchers hope to use proteins to help build rare-earth-free permanent magnets as part of an £8 million international project.

The University of Leeds is working with the University of Washington and the University of Cambridge on Protein Organised Engineered Materials, known as POEM. Led by the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design, the project is backed by the Advanced Research + Invention Agency, or ARIA.

POEM forms part of ARIA’s Universal Fabricators programme, which is supporting 11 teams to develop scalable manufacturing processes that use proteins to assemble advanced inorganic and composite materials.

The Leeds team will bring together expertise from the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology and the Bragg Centre for Materials Research. Researchers will work with protein designers in Washington and high-throughput materials specialists in Cambridge, while contributing Leeds’ capabilities in materials scale-up and characterisation.

Building magnets with biology

Permanent magnets play important roles in technologies including wind turbines, electric-vehicle motors and data storage. However, many of the strongest options depend on rare-earth elements, whose extraction and processing can damage the environment, while demand for the materials is increasing.

The project will explore a different approach, inspired by how biological systems create complex structures under ambient conditions.

Designed proteins will act as nanoscale templates, directing where inorganic magnetic crystals form and controlling their size, shape, spacing and orientation. The researchers aim to carry this organisation across different length scales to create strong permanent magnets without rare-earth elements.

Dr Johanna Galloway, an EPSRC David Clarke Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Chemistry, said: “Organisms are phenomenal engineers, able to precisely construct functional materials using biomolecules to direct order across hierarchical scales, but nowhere yet have we found a naturally evolved strong permanent magnet.

“We will use the sustainable synthesis principles of biology (Earth-abundant elements, ambient temperature and pressure, and aqueous solution) and make biomolecules that both direct crystallisation of inorganics from aqueous solution and assemble these into functional higher order biotemplated strong permanent magnetic structures.”

Alongside Dr Galloway and Dr Timothy Moorsom, the Leeds team includes Professor Michael Webb, Dr James Ross, Dr Matthew Simmons, Dr Daniel Baker, Nelly Sadarova and Steven Foxcroft-Chowney. 

Dr Timothy Moorsom, from the School of Chemical and Process Engineering, will contribute expertise in magnetic materials and their behaviour at the smallest scales.

The internal arrangement of a magnetic material, known as its microstructure, strongly influences its performance. By using proteins to position crystals as they form, the project aims to achieve a degree of control that conventional manufacturing methods struggle to provide.

Dr Moorsom said: “To meet the materials challenges of the next century, we need to think beyond the approaches that defined the last one. As we now know, the properties of magnetic materials are overwhelmingly defined by their microstructure.

“By using proteins in the assembly of magnetic materials, we are applying one of the most elegant and novel methods of microstructural assembly to one of the hardest problems in materials science.”

The researchers will combine protein design with automated synthesis, small-scale screening, imaging and magnetic testing. Over the project’s three years, the team aims to demonstrate high-performance cobalt ferrite and L1₀-type magnets, while developing methods that could ultimately be scaled beyond the laboratory.

ARIA’s wider £50 million Universal Fabricators programme will initially run for three years. Its projects span three challenges focused on using proteins to manufacture fibres, membranes and magnets with structures that are difficult to achieve through existing industrial processes.

Further information

• Explore the POEM project on ARIA’s Universal Fabricators website.
• Find out more about the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology.
• Visit the Bragg Centre for Materials Research website.
• For media enquiries, please contact Faculty Communications Manager Matt Gardner at M.D.Gardner@leeds.ac.uk.