Magnetic materials are classified into two main groups : soft magnetic materials and permanent magnets. Soft magnetic materials are used on tonnage scale as cores of transformers and armatures of dynamos and motors and principally work in a.c. circuits. Permanent magnets can deliver a constant amount of energy in it given air gap with or without any external aid and are used in a wide variety of electrical and electronic instruments such as electricity meters, ammeters, voltmeters, loud speakers, telephones. teleprinters,motors, generators, televisions, lifting devices,etc. The manufacture of soft & permanent magnet materials presents a number of problems. They either contain metals like nickel and cobalt which do
not occur in India or require high grade starting materials which are not manufactured at present or offer processing difficulties. To find suitable solutions of these problems and to develop suitable substitute materials a programme of research on the development of magnetic materials was initiated at the National Metall-urgical Laboratory sometime back and results are reported in this paper together with a review of the existing magnetic materials to bring out their technical and eco-nomic merits and demerits
