Magnetisation of a plain fluid
Can plain water, or the HHO off a cell, be magnetised by the coil — and how much?
- M
- Magnetisation, A/m
- χ
- Volume susceptibility
- H
- Applied field, A/m
- ΔB
- Added flux density, T
LaTeX
M = χ \cdot H, \qquad ΔB = \mu_0 \cdot M
Result
M
Magnetisation
-0.452 A/m
The medium's magnetisation while it is in the field. Negative means it points against the field — a diamagnet.
χ
Susceptibility
-9.04e-6
The medium's volume susceptibility at this pressure. Of order 10⁻⁵ for a liquid and 10⁻⁶ or less for a gas at one atmosphere.
ΔB
Added flux density
-568 nT
μ₀M: what the medium adds to the flux density in the tube, over and above the coil's own μ₀H.
LaTeX
-0.452\,\mathrm{A/m} = -9.04e-6 \cdot 50\,\mathrm{kA/m}, \qquad -568\,\mathrm{nT} = \mu_0 \cdot -0.452\,\mathrm{A/m}
Worth knowing
- Water is diamagnetic: its susceptibility is 9.04 parts per million and negative, so in the coil's field it magnetises against the field and is pushed very slightly out of it rather than drawn in. The magnetisation is -0.452 A/m, and a 5 % slurry of micron iron in this field carries about 16,600 times as much, the other way.
- No remanence exists in a plain fluid or gas. A diamagnet or paramagnet is magnetised only while the field is on it; the instant the medium leaves the drive coil it is unmagnetised, and nothing is carried to a downstream coil. What a pickup coil would see from this medium is the drive coil's own field through the medium's parts-per-million, not anything the medium brought with it.
This result is a link — the address bar holds your numbers, so it can be pasted into a post and opened to the same answer.
What this looks like
The formula behind the curve
- M
- Magnetisation, A/m
- χ
- Volume susceptibility
- H
- Applied field, A/m
- ΔB
- Added flux density, T
LaTeX
M = χ \cdot H, \qquad ΔB = \mu_0 \cdot M
The formula behind the curve
- M
- Magnetisation, A/m
- χ
- Volume susceptibility
- H
- Applied field, A/m
- ΔB
- Added flux density, T
LaTeX
M = χ \cdot H, \qquad ΔB = \mu_0 \cdot M
Method
- Look up the medium's volume susceptibility at 20 °C and one atmosphere: −9.0 × 10⁻⁶ for water, +1.8 × 10⁻⁶ for oxygen, +6.0 × 10⁻⁷ for the two-to-one hydrogen–oxygen mix off a cell, −2 × 10⁻⁹ for hydrogen alone.
- For a gas, scale the susceptibility with the pressure in atmospheres: twice the pressure is twice the molecules and twice the response. A liquid's density barely changes with pressure and its susceptibility is taken as fixed.
- Multiply by the applied field for the magnetisation, in amperes per metre — the same unit as the field, so the susceptibility is simply the ratio.
- Multiply by μ₀ for what the medium adds to the flux density. Against the coil's own μ₀H it is the susceptibility again: parts per million.
- Compare with a 5 % slurry of micron iron in the same field, which is demagnetisation-limited to about 0.15 H — the ratio is what "plain water" costs.
Assumptions
- Linear response, M = χH, which holds for every diamagnet and for a paramagnetic gas at any field a coil can make: oxygen at room temperature is nowhere near saturating below hundreds of tesla.
- Handbook susceptibilities at 20 °C. A paramagnet's falls as 1/T (Curie's law) and a diamagnet's does not change; neither moves enough to matter here.
- A gas at pressure is an ideal gas: density and susceptibility proportional to pressure. Good to a per cent or so up to tens of bar.
- No particulate at all. The moment any iron is in the tube this page is the wrong one, and the medium-susceptibility calculation is the right one; the two differ by four orders of magnitude at 5 % loading.
- Nothing here is Meyer's. The estate material describes a medium in a tube and does not say what it is; the question "could it just be water, or the gas off the cell" is the archive's, and this is the arithmetic that answers it.