Magnetic weapons

[Rivkin]

Originally Posted by Ann Feuerbach

This is all such great stuff. It will take me awhile to absorb it all and figure out what it all means! I got someone lined up with homemade ingots any suggestions of how to test them? RIVKIN could you suggest any suitable methods?

The problems I see is that:
1. The magnetization depends on two unknown factors - how non-uniform the steel is and what kind of fields the sample was exposed to. Lighting, wielding machines and subways all produce significant fields, capable of magnetizing pieces of iron.

So at least two different experiments should be condacted, unless you are interested in non-uniformities alone. Then the reasonable thing is to ask a steel metallurgist, but I think they actually measure permeability - they take not very large field, apply it to the sample and see what kind of magnetization is produced - it's supposed to be uniform if for example you apply the field along the easy axis (parallel to the sword?), but only if the sample itself is uniform.

Another way is to use X_Ray scattering or conductance or chemical tests - I think all these techniques are been used in the steel industry.

another interesting thing would be to try to achieve the true ground state in the sample by heating it up and cooling it down in the absence of external fields, with probably some random ac fields being applied to the body.

Concerning shape-dependent demag factors, there are programs like rkmag and oomf that allow one to simulate the magnetizations, so you should get the approximate picture of what kind of state you should have.

2. To Mare Rosu:

Thanx for the pictures,
The thing I would consider to be interesting is a conductance test. I don't think it can fire up with a simple resistometer, but it can be that if you place probes at about 5mm from each other on the dagger and move them alongside the dagger's surface that you will be able to see a significant change in the resistance along some set of points, which is possibly can be connected to the changes in the metall itself.

The problem is that not all steels are ferromagnetic, but they are all conductors, so unlike magnetism, you should not see a lot of difference.

P.S. I'm not a steel guy and not an experimentalist, so I really should not give any advices.

Sincerely yours,

K.Rivkin