At ICEMA 2025 in Nice (France), Prof. A.P. Zhukov, a scientific contributor to the INFINITE project, delivered a keynote speech entitled “Giant Magneto-Impedance Effect in Magnetic Microwires: Challenges, Advances and Perspectives”, offering a deep dive into the physics and potential of amorphous magnetic microwires for next-generation sensor technologies.
Amorphous magnetic wires are known for their unique magnetic properties — including magnetic bistability and the Giant Magneto-Impedance (GMI) effect — combined with high mechanical strength and corrosion resistance, making them suitable for a range of advanced industrial applications such as magnetic and magnetoelastic sensors and tunable metamaterials.
In his keynote, Prof. Zhukov, presented the latest research on optimising magnetic softness and enhancing the GMI effect in Co-rich microwires. His work addresses a key challenge in the field: while GMI ratios of 200–300% have been achieved experimentally, these figures still fall short of the theoretical limit of 3000%.
The presentation explored how different annealing treatments affect the magnetic behaviour of Co-rich microwires:
- Conventional annealing often results in magnetic hardening and an increase in coercivity.
- In contrast, stress-annealing preserves magnetic softness and significantly boosts the GMI effect.
Remarkably, samples that underwent proper stress-annealing exhibited nearly hysteresis-free behaviour, with coercivity around 2 A/m and magnetic anisotropy fields near 35 A/m. Under optimal conditions, a GMI ratio exceeding 700% was achieved — a substantial improvement over previous benchmarks.
These findings are especially relevant to the INFINITE project’s objectives, where magnetic microwires play a central role in enabling wireless structural health monitoring of composite materials in aerospace applications. The work presented strengthens the scientific foundation of the INFINITE sensorisation strategy and supports its ambition to enable a smarter, more circular and resilient aircraft lifecycle.