Oldfeller--FSO
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Hobby is now "concentrated neuropany"
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Fayetteville, NC
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Sorry, good try though. You are thinking iron magnets and yes they did weaken over time and impacts and heat, etc. All the stuff you remember about lawnmower flywheels is accurate and is still true, for iron magnets.
Yes, today's rare earth super magnets DO require a strong origin magnetic field while making them to orient all their electrons so their orbital paths all align. This is a single protracted strong magnetic pulse that is applied at the heat treatment Curie point (heat point where magnetism leaves a permanent magnet when it is being heated up) just at the point where the temperature is dropping down past the Curie point and the atomic matrix structure settles into its permanent orientation and the material becomes fixed. Yes it is a very strong field, but not that much stronger than the resulting batch of magnets are and they keep right on trucking after they take a set. Indeed, as the joint orientation takes place the cooler aligned magnets on the outer layers help orient the hotter ones in the middle of the batch --- you didn't think a large batch of magnets cooled all at the same time, did you?
Supermagnets are powered at the atomic level by normal whirling electrons of an alloy of iron, boron and neodymium. The resulting sintered and spin oriented at the Curie point of heat treat powdered metal iron boron neodymium material has the somewhat unique property of taking a better "set" than other materials that have been used in the past.
(although this is no longer totally true as other even better rare earth super magnet materials are now coming out of ongoing super conductor research).
This magnetic ability is in ALL materials that have whirling electrons. Super cooled super magnets can force field suspend an apple for example, by aligning all its electrons in all its elements temporarily. The ability to have (1) a strong organized field and (2) take a permanent set AND KEEP IT in the temperature range that us human people like to live in is what makes supermagnets unusual.
Hey, if we lived on Pluto, most pure gases like hydrogen or helium would be supermagnetic solids too.
So, the energy in the current permanent supermagnets can be destroyed by heat or by exposure to strong AC fields over a period of time by disarranging the aligned atoms so their rotational fields are randomized.
Think of a laser -- it gets its power by all the light waves waving in the same polarity and frequency and running totally parallel to each other.
A supermagnet gets its power the same way, all atoms having electrons whirling together in the same orientation while locked down in a solidified molecular metallic matrix.
When solidfied and fixed in this parallel whirl matrix orientation, the normal weak (defined as outside the nucleus) nuclear forces are all running in the same orientation and the projection effects are NOT self-cancelled by its neighbors -- these levels of magnetic forces are there in the natural materials all the time, just not organized.
The force level of a supermagnet is always available in the raw materials all the time, it is just normally randomized and tends to self cancel itself naturally at our normal human operating temperatures.
Did you know that there is always significant amounts of mechanical stress inside the supermagnet since it is always trying to reorient itself to randomize the electron pathways?
The materials that can take a good fix and KEEP it for many years are very rare, iron is not one of these naturally, which is why neodymium and cobalt are needed in the alloy, to give it MORE ABILITY to resist randomization.
So, this supermagnetism is really an expression of an organized weak atomic force sorta like a laser is an expression of an organized weak photonic force.
Thought stretcher time .......
Imagine what you could do with the STRONG nuclear forces down inside the nucleus if this supermagnetism is just an organized projection of a relatively weak nuclear force?
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