How many gauss

It depends on the application. If you need the highest strength in the smallest possible package at room temperature, grade N52 is the strongest available.

Many of our magnets are offered in grade N42, which is a great balance between cost, strength and performance at higher operating temperatures. You can get the same strength as an N52 magnet by using a slightly larger N42 magnet.

This is especially true if your magnet shape is very thin. See our detailed article on Temperature and Neodymium Magnets for more details. For a complete list of available grades, see our Specs page. A magnet doesn't have one specific amount of Gauss in it. Residual Flux Density , Br , is the magnetic induction remaining in a saturated magnetic material after the magnetizing field has been removed.

Scroll down to the last section of this article for a more detailed explanation. This number is a material property which is independent of the magnet shape. See our Specs page for more Br values for various neodymium magnet grades.

The Surface Field is the strength of the magnetic field measured right at the surface of the magnet. Neodymium magnets are by far the strongest type of permanent magnet available.

Magnet advancements are a history of increasing coercivity. Neodymium magnets are both stronger and less apt to be demagnetized than other magnet types. The Maximum Energy Product is the point on this curve where the B value multiplied by the H value is at its maximum.

Magnets with a bigger Maximum Energy Product will have greater strength. Specifically, the shape of the BH Curve indicates both how strong a magnet is and how strong of a magnetic field you would need to demagnetize the magnet.

A BH Curve describes the magnetic properties of the magnetic material. Consider a neodymium magnet sitting inside a magnetizer. The magnetizer is essentially a coil of wire wrapped around the magnet, through which we will apply a very strong current to create a magnetic field. In the graph at right, the horizontal axis shows the strength of the Applied magnetic field H — the one we get by running current through the wire.

The vertical axis shows the Induced field B , which the permanent magnet creates by itself. The magnet we will start with has just been manufactured, but not yet magnetized. The magnetic field it creates is zero B. Articles Cases Courses Quiz.

About Recent Edits Go ad-free. Edit article. View revision history Report problem with Article. Citation, DOI and article data. Bell, D. Gauss unit. Reference article, Radiopaedia. G unit of magnetism CGS unit of magnetic flux density Gs unit of magnetism. URL of Article. Terminology As for all eponymous units of measurement when the unit is written out in full it is not capitalized, but when shortened to its symbol it is capitalized.

History and etymology It is named after the German mathematician and physicist Karl Friedrich Gauss 2. Obviously, the plain steel balance springs used in watches before the advent of Nivarox type alloys would be incredibly vulnerable to external magnetic fields, but even a watch with a standard modern Nivarox balance spring would be instantly rendered unusable by a magnet as powerful as the one we used in our test.

It's one thing to know your car has an air bag; it's another thing to deliberately run it into a brick wall to find out if it works like it's supposed to. This unit is used to express the strength of the other magnetic field, the so-called H field — as is its equivalent, the oersted. The H field is basically the strength of the B field, but including its effects inside a material on the overall field.

Fortunately for those of us comparison shopping for antimagnetic watches, in air or a vacuum the B and H fields, and therefore, the gauss and the oersted, are about equal.

As you can see, the B and H fields aren't really different so much as they are the same phenomenon seen from different perspectives. Fun fact: your brain produces a field of about one picotesla, or 0. Obviously a strong enough magnetic field will physically damage a watch with ferromagnetic parts, but watchmakers, and watch owners, are worried about slightly more subtle changes.

Above is an early 20th century, size 16 Waltham Riverside pocket watch with a solid balance, and Elinvar balance spring a forerunner of Nivarox. The purpose of the balance spring is to do for the balance what gravity does for a pendulum — pull it back to a neutral position when it's swinging, with a force that is exactly proportional to how hard the pendulum, or balance, is pushed.

Anything that interferes with that is going to upset timekeeping. As we mentioned before, the most common effect of magnetization is for a watch to run fast. There is, however, a subtler effect. If a spring containing ferromagnetic materials like Nivarox is exposed to ambient magnetic fields, the gradual accumulation of magnetism in the alloy can also interfere with the temperature compensation properties of the balance spring, and it may begin to run at different rates at different temperatures.

The issue was described in a story for the Horological Journal by watchmaker Gideon Levingston, who was working at the time on his "Carbontime" oscillator system, which incorporated a carbon fiber balance spring intended to address this very issue. If you've been following Kari Voutilainen's work for a while you might even remember that Kari used the Carbontime oscillator in one of his watches, as PuristsPro reported via watchmaker and horological writer Curtis Thomson, in Obviously magnetic fields can be a major problem for watches, watch owners, and watchmakers in both immediately obvious, and more subtle ways.

Now let's look at two watches built to resist this hazard. For the purposes of the test, the magnet was left on its styrofoam lower box and to prevent damage to both the magnet and the watch, a folded cloth was placed in between the two.

Several earlier experiments with the magnet and ferromagnetic materials by "experiments" I mean "randomly choosing heavy iron or steel objects to pick up" had produced scratched objects, a slightly chipped magnet, and a sense of the need for an abundance of caution when handling the HODINKEE Demon Core. The results were interesting to say the least.

The watch was placed — extremely carefully — on the magnet and there was no visible effect at all. Allowed to run for 24 hours after exposure to the magnet, the watch showed no visible deviation on its rate, either. The solution used by Omega for this watch is the use of non-ferromagnetic materials for all critical components, including the balance, escape wheel, lever, and balance spring.

Interestingly enough the entire watch, which is cased in stainless steel, showed very little susceptibility to the magnet overall — the force exerted certain wasn't strong enough to pick the watch up, which was very surprising. Second up was the Milgauss. Now, this is the one that actually did make me nervous. Milgauss doesn't mean "resistant to a 4, gauss permanent neodymium magnet. Much to my surprise, and considerable relief, the visible effect on the watch was zero, and in fact, just as with the Omega, there was relatively little attractive force between the case and the bracelet.

We allowed the Milgauss to run for 24 hours as well, and just as with the Omega, rate deviation, if there was any, wasn't visible. Several interesting things came out of this little test. First of all, both of these watches apparently successfully shrugged off exposure to a magnetic field far in excess of anything you are likely to encounter in real life, at least unless you are the sort of person who likes to order extremely powerful rare earth magnets and stick watches to them.

Secondly, apparently both watches are using so-called austenitic — and therefore, largely amagnetic — stainless steels. As it turns out, both L presumed for the Omega and L confirmed for the Rolex are steels in which, when they cool, the iron crystals are in a non-ferromagnetic form.