This article attempts to introduce a simple and robust way for the classification of soft magnetic material by using multivariate statistics. The six magnetic properties including coercive magnetic field, relative magnetic permeability, electrical resistivity magnetic inductions, i.e., remanence and saturation along with Curie temperature are used for the classification of 16 soft magnetic materials. Descriptive statistics have been used for defining the prioritization order of the mentioned magnetic characteristics with coercive magnetic field and Curie temperature as the most and least important characteristics for classification of soft magnetic material. Moreover, it has also justified the usage of cluster analysis and principal component analysis for classifying the enlisted materials. After descriptive statistics, cluster analysis is used for classification of materials into four groups, i.e., excellent, good, fair and poor while defining the prioritization order of materials on a relative scale. Principal component analysis reveals that the relative permeability is responsible for defining 99.69% of total variance and is also negatively correlated with the coercive magnetic field. Therefore, these two characteristics are considered the responsible factors for categorically placing the enlisted materials into four clusters. Furthermore, principal component analysis also helps in figuring out the fact that a combined influential consequence of relative permeability, coercive magnetic field, electrical resistivity and critical temperature are responsible for defining prioritization ordering of materials within the clusters. The material's suitability index is identified while making use of adjacency and decision matrices obtained from material assessment graph and relative importance of magnetic properties, respectively. Afterward this material suitability index is used to rank the enlisted materials based on selected attributes. According to the suitability index, the best choice among enlisted soft magnetic materials is Supermalloy, Magnifer 7904 which is present in group 1 labeled as excellent by multivariate analysis. Therefore, the results of graph theory are in accordance with cluster analysis and principal component analysis, thus confirming the potential of this intelligent approach for the selection application specific magnetic materials.
Keywords: MCDM model; descriptive analysis; graph theory; magnetic materials; multivariate statistics; principal component analysis (PCA); soft magnetic materials.