Expanding magnet company feels pull of big business

A Dublin company has developed a magnet strong enough to lift a Mini, but small enough to fit in a supermarket shopping bag. It also designs and builds other products that make use of very powerful, but compact permanent magnets.

Magnetic Solutions Ltd is based at the IDA Centre in Pearse Street, Dublin. A former Trinity College campus company, it moved there about a year ago and now employs nine people.

The company was founded by Trinity's Prof Michael Coey four years ago to exploit research at the university into "rare earth permanent magnets", a new type of magnetic material with a much stronger "pull" than conventional iron or steel magnets.

Permanent magnets are familiar to most people only as the horseshoe-shaped children's toy, but permanent magnets are essential to a range of everyday products such as audio speakers, telephone handsets, cordless hand tools, laptop computers and computer disc drives to name just a few.

This makes permanent magnets very big business with a world market for magnetic materials in 1997 worth about $31 billion, including hard, semi-hard and soft magnets, Prof Coey estimates.

In the early 1980s the novel rare earth magnets began to emerge. They offered new properties compared with the existing iron and steel magnets, including the ability to form the magnet into any shape. They could also be assembled as pieces of a whole that could deliver magnetic fields in different strengths, shapes and sizes.

Magnetic Solutions grew out of research at Trinity, but the company is now in command of its own research activities, said Mr Thomas Gallogly who heads production. There are more employees involved in research than in assembly, he added.

"We have an advanced R&D centre. Most of our research and development is carried out at our centre at Pearse Street. We are a stand-alone company and all of our research is done in-house. We are constantly developing our own products," Mr Gallogly explained.

The move to Pearse Street became necessary as sales increased, he said. Its home in Trinity became "too small to cope with expansion".

As a private company it would not discuss turnover, but it has developed a far flung client base with customers in the US, most EU states, Brazil and Asia. "We have clients all over the world."

The company develops permanent magnet products for sale, but will also undertake "bespoke" product development to client specification.

The company is involved in developing products that deliver a strong magnetic field in a relatively small package, and competes with suppliers of electromagnets. Electromagnets need a power supply and large ones often need a cooling system, but these are not necessary with permanent magnets. Devices containing these magnets can therefore be much smaller.

One device that would easily fit in a shopping bag can produce a field of 1.2 Tesla, a magnetic field sufficient to lift a Morris Mini, he said. Products include devices to produce variable fields, large steady fields and switchable fields.

The company works in a specialist area, but this has not prevented it from using advanced technology to open up world markets. It is a good example of how Irish research can be converted into high technology jobs.