I took a tour of the Langley National Transonic Facility (NTF) last year, where they mentioned the fan drive motor was one of the largest in the world. A bit of Googling turned up this press release:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/releases/1997/Dec97/97_133.html
135,000 hp, built by...
Moog:
http://www.polysci.com/specialdevices/actuator05.html
MPC Products Corp. (disclaimer, I work for this company):
http://mpcproducts.com/linear.asp
I can't claim to know the source of the info, but my boss once handed me a torn, taped, and xeroxed chart that has relative costs of the soft magnetic materials we typically use. It goes like this:
MATERIAL TYPE RELATIVE COST
Low Carbon Steel 0.5
Silicon Steel...
G10 is a glass cloth / epoxy laminated composite specified by NEMA, IIRC. It is often used as a structural element that can double as an electrical insulator, as when used for a PCB substrate.
Try NASA-STD-8739.3 -- Soldered Electrical Connections. As for materials selection, MSFC-HDBK-527 -- Materials Selection List for Space Flight Hardware, might be of help.
sean
I knew a grad student whose research was on magnetically active fiber-reinforced composites. This was designed more as a health monitoring function for composite structures, but it might be something along the lines of what you're looking for.
Search for:
Magnetostrictive Tagged Composites...
http://www.tam.uiuc.edu/directory/services/testing/facility.html
http://www.tam.uiuc.edu/directory/services/testing/tests.html
While located at a University, the facility is available for testing of commercial products. While I was a student in the building I witnessed the machine in action...
