Magnetic alignment of steel question

[tim9000]

Hi,

I have a question about steel, for instance, silicon steel used in magnetic cores.

I was wondering about how Iron magnetises: can you align the grains/domains and heat treat it [or anything], so that it responds differently to flux one way then the other direction?

For example, say you had a cube, could you do something to it that on one axis, you could magnetise and reverse the domains cyclically, as any electromotive core, but on the perpendicular plane of the cube the domains will resist aligning? So you can pass flux easily one one plane, but the reluctance is much higher on another plane?

Or are the domains more of a sub-atomic thing, which you can't physically configure?

Thanks

 

[sophiecentaur]

I found this link, which could be of interest. That was from a search using "Magnetic anisotropy" and I found quite a few hits. Happy reading.

 

[tim9000]

Thanks for the Reply Sophiecentaur.
I knew there would be a name for the phenomena, just wasn't sure what it would be called.
From reading the article, the uses seem to be mainly reading/writing heads. Are there other industrial uses?
This is going to be a bit difficult for me to describe.
The reason I ask is, I'm interested in creating an inductor/transformer core, where it is demagnetised, by opposing fluxes, but I then couple another flux to coil 3:
The figure attached is not a complete drawing, it is just a section of my idea, the Φ₃ would actually circulate up and back [not shown in picture] around in one effective circular path not shown (i.e. not through the same lengths as Φ₁ and Φ₂) but the trick is that I want Φ₁ and Φ₂ to circulate around a path including a section of the same path as Φ₃, but I don't want Φ₁ and Φ₂ to flow around each other, I want them to be separate, hence the anisotrophic section separating them, coercing them to flow around Φ₃'s section.
The end result is that I"m coupled to Φ₃'s coils but not 1 or 2's coils. [I can do a better pic if necessary]

So I'm wondering if steel can be anisotrophically magnetised for this purpose?

Thanks in advance