Magnetic Shielding

Magnetic shielding

Equipment sometimes requires isolation from external magnetic fields. For static or slowly varying magnetic fields (below about 100 kHz) the Faraday shielding described above is ineffective. In these cases shields made of high magnetic permeability metal alloys can be used, such as sheets of permalloy and mu-metal or with nanocrystalline grain structure ferromagnetic metal coatings. These materials do not block the magnetic field, as with electric shielding, but rather draw the field into themselves, providing a path for the magnetic field lines around the shielded volume. The best shape for magnetic shields is thus a closed container surrounding the shielded volume. The effectiveness of this type of shielding depends on the material's permeability, which generally drops off at both very low magnetic field strengths and high field strengths where the material becomes saturated. Therefore, to achieve low residual fields, magnetic shields often consist of several enclosures, one inside the other, each of which successively reduces the field inside it. Entry holes within shielding surfaces may degrade their performance significantly.