Magnetics Business & Technology - Summer 2018 - 33

MARKETPLACE

Index of Advertisers
Index of Advertisers
Arnold Magnetic Technologies
Bartington Instruments

2
www.bartington.com

COMSOL, Inc.

36
www.comsol.com

GMW Associates

5
www.gmw.com

HTS-110

26
www.hts-110.com

ITG Electronics

LE USA Walker Scientific

7
www.arnoldmagnetics.com

19, 23
www.itg-electronics.com
25
www.laboratorio.elettrofisico.com

Magnet Applications, A Bunting Magnetics Company
9
www.magnetapplications.com
Magnet Physics

27
www.magnet-physics.com

Magnetic Instrumentation

17
www.maginst.com

MEDA, Inc.

10-11
www.meda.com

Metrolab Technology

13
www.metrolab.com

New England Wire Technologies
Spontaneous Materials

29
www.newenglandwire.com

33
www.spontaneousmaterials.com

Walter T. Benecki, LLC
The Global Permanent Magnet Industry
32
www.magneticsmag.com/main/gpm

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SPONTANEOUS THOUGHTS
a Column by Dr. Stan Trout

Continued from page 34...
It concluded that there would soon be an insufficient number of gates
in the New York City region to handle all the passengers and that a
new airport was needed to alleviate this problem. These conclusions
were the basis for their justification of the project.
However, buried deep within the report were the assumptions. One
assumption was that the number of passengers per plane would
remain relatively constant. Anyone who has flown commercially for
the last few decades knows this isn't true. Aircraft today hold several
times more passengers than the planes of the 1960's. The jetport was
predicated on an erroneous assumption; it was never needed.
Do we have a faulty assumption with dysprosium? Most forecasts I
have seen usually look at the effect of one variable. They assume that
everything else remains essentially constant. In the case of dysprosium, we have already seen that when prices go up, people make a
wide variety of adjustments. Taken together, these adjustments tend
to partially offset the higher price of Dy, and therefore have a moderating effect. It seems reasonable to assume that this behavior would
happen again.
The time to become nervous about price and availability is when
things change rapidly. Then no one in the supply chain has enough
time to make any adjustments. But today we have a few extra things
tucked in our back pocket that we can use to buck any price increases.
Beyond the advice from Adamas about hedging supplies of dysprosium, perhaps the best hedge for Dy may be a backup design in samarium cobalt that avoids dysprosium completely, or even a ferrite
design. Of course, an immediate concern arises about having enough
cobalt, and to a lesser extent samarium. This makes a good case for
being prepared for any possibility, which is the nature of all good business and engineering.
So while we have made good progress on the issues surrounding
dysprosium in the past five years, more work remains to be done.

-SRT 6/18/2018

www.MagneticsMag.com

Summer 2018 * Magnetics Business & Technology

http://www.arnoldmagnetics.com http://www.spontaneousmaterials.com http://www.bartington.com http://www.comsol.com http://www.gmw.com http://www.hts-110.com http://www.itg-electronics.com http://www.laboratorio.elettrofisico.com http://www.magnetapplications.com http://www.magnet-physics.com http://www.maginst.com http://www.meda.com http://www.metrolab.com http://www.newenglandwire.com http://www.spontaneousmaterials.com http://www.magneticsmag.com/main/gpm http://www.MagneticsMag.com

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