If iron cobalt and nickel are magnetic (which I think is the right term, but it feels wrong since magnets stick but it doesn’t magnet to other steel) then why does using nickel to make stainless steel render steel non-magnetic?
Or is my metallurgical understanding just completely off?
In: Physics
For the purposes of ELI5, magnetism occurs when the atoms inside your material are all aligned in the same direction (imagine a bunch of tiny magnets all aligned N-S in perfect unison).
When we melt the iron and nickel down to make steel (along with anything else getting mixed in), we run into 2 issues for magnetism:
1. Adding that much heat will cause all the atoms to jiggle around a lot more which throws them out of alignment. If you make the atoms hot enough, they permanently fall out of alignment. We call that point the Curie Temperature – the temp at which natural magnets lose their magnetism.
2. Even if the iron stays in alignment, you now have a bunch of atoms all mixed throughout the iron which means that whatever was all previously aligned is now spaced way out by other atoms so it’s “less dense” in a sense. This drop in “magnetic density” makes the magnet effects vanish.
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