Herein, the edges in carbon materials were quantitatively evaluated by summing the amount of hydrogen and the amount of functional groups without hydrogen in the material. The amount of hydrogen in the carbon material was quantitated via temperature-programmed oxidation (TPO) under an oxygen atmosphere, whereas the amount of functional groups was determined via temperature-programmed desorption (TPD) of the sample under an inert atmosphere. Consequently, the amount of edges in exfoliated carbon fibers prepared from polyacrylonitrile (PAN) (referred to as PAN-1000) was 9.4 mmol g−1. In addition, Ketjen Black (KB) and activated carbon (AC) had edge content of 1.3 and 3.6 mmol g−1, respectively. Because the total amount of functional groups of PAN-1000, KB and AC were estimated to be 8.18, 0.082 and 1.02 mmol g−1 via TPD, the total amount of edges and oxygen-containing functional groups of each sample could be quantified. The difference between amount of edges and the amount of functional groups is speculated to correspond to the amount of edges terminated with hydrogen. This study revealed that detailed information about the edges such as their proportion terminated with oxygen-containing functional groups, the species and amount of oxygen-containing functional groups via a combination of TPO and TPD.

We reported a P/M soft magnetic material with core loss value of , which is lower than that of 0.35mm-thick laminated material, by using high purity gas-atomized iron powder. Lack of mechanical strength and high cost of powder production are significant issues for industrial use. In order to achieve both low core loss and high strength by using inexpencive powder, the improvement of powder shape and surface morphology and binder strength was conducted. As the result, the material based on water-atomized powder with 80 MPa of TRS and 108 W/kg of core loss (W10/1k) was achieved.

Recently, there has been a growing demand for soft magnetic materials with high conversion characteristics, due to the trend of electric devices to higher-frequency range. For ruduceing core loss in the high-frequency range, using finely grained and high-resistivity Fe-based alloy powder is most efficient methods. But, conventionally, there's been a compressibility problem for such powder. In this work, Fe-based alloy powder that offers both high resistivity and high compressibility was developed by studyuing composition of the powder, and reduction of core loss of P/M soft magnetic materials in the high frequency range was achieved.