Researchers 3D Print Metallic Glass for More Efficient Electric Motors

A new alloy for cleaner electric motors

European researchers have developed an iron-based metallic glass that can be 3D printed using laser powder bed fusion. The goal is to make electric motors more efficient by reducing the energy lost to heat and magnetic drag.

The alloy, developed under the AM2SoftMag project, avoids the rare-earth and cobalt materials that dominate current soft-magnetic alloys. That makes it cheaper and easier to source. In laser powder bed fusion, the material gets hit repeatedly with intense heat. That usually triggers crystallization, which ruins the soft-magnetic properties. The team designed this specific composition to resist that devitrification. Its critical casting thickness is around 1 mm, compared with roughly 150 micrometers for existing commercial alternatives like Kuamet 6B2 and Finemet.

Tests on a Renishaw RenAM500Q Flex system showed coercivity values between 44 and 77 A/m. The lowest value, 44 A/m, came from a single-scan specimen with a 20 ms delay. That is at least an order of magnitude lower than previous LPBF results for comparable iron-based metallic glasses.

Still early days for motor prototypes

The research remains at the material and process stage. No one has yet demonstrated this alloy inside a working electric motor. The printed specimens contained pores and cracks, and magnetic permeability was not measured because sample geometry variations made evaluation difficult.

Next steps will focus on reducing those defects, scaling the LPBF process, and testing the material in actual motor rotors and stators. Saarland University, IMDEA Materials, the Italian National Metrology Institute, and Technische Universität Berlin are all involved in the next phase. The project is funded by the European Innovation Council through the Horizon Europe Pathfinder Open program.

AM2SoftMag sits alongside other work on additive manufacturing for motors. In February 2026, German manufacturer Additive Drives raised a mid-double-digit million euro investment to scale its rare-earth-free 3D printed motor technology. The company reports industrial motor efficiencies up to 98 percent. That is a different approach to the same problem: making motors that use less material, run cooler, and rely on easier-to-source metals.

If the consortium can turn this alloy into functional motor parts, it could give electric vehicle and industrial motor makers a new path away from rare-earth dependencies. The 3D printing angle also opens the door to complex geometries that are impossible with conventional stamping or casting.