soft and hard magnetic materials

Ferromagnetic materials can be of two types: one class with thin hysteresis loop characteristics and are called soft magnetic materials. Their coercive field value and area under the loop are small. Hence hysteresis loss and eddy current loss are minimum. These materials (ferrite an example) are used in transformer cores which are used in power transmission. These materials can easily magnetized and demagnetized. Other class is called hard magnetic material with large hysteresis loop. some iron alloys are examples. Demagnetizing these materials is not easy. hence they are used to make permanent amagnets. coercive field, hysteresis loss, eddy current loss are more in this class with very low initial permeability. Antiferromagnetic and ferrimagnetic materials are also belongs to ferromagnetic category but net magnetic moment is nil in antiferromagnetic while in ferrimagnetic materials, there exist a slight magnetic moment.