Week 5

Hi everyone,

Happy fourth of July! I started to look at the results I had received from the field samples and showed them to Paul. He pointed out that for most of the results, there was no ferrous particle count in ppm. This is an issue because it means that the magnetometer is not counting the concentration of ferrous particles correctly because we compared one of the field samples to a ferrogram result of that sample. The ferrogram shows that there are at least a couple hundred of ferrous particles in ppm for that sample, yet the Q230 was not able to detect them. I had emailed Tom Barraclough one of the inentors of the Q230 to ask him why this phenomenon might occur. Unfortunately I will not be able to contact him until next week because he is unavailable this week. The graph are the results of the field samples that I tested last week. The left vertical axis represents the ferrous particle counts of particles >25 microns. The right vertical axis represents the total ferrous particle concentration in ppm and the horizontal axis is the field sample tests. The green bar is the counts for each of the field sample particle counts of particles >25 microns and the orange bar is the ferrous particle concentration. As shown by the graph there are only five orange bars for a total of 38 tests and the ferrogram from sample 16122 (last two tests located on bottom right)had at least a couple of thousand ferrous particles in ppm. I also made another batch of reference samples containing S-1000 iron test dust using the same S-1000 concentrate as the previous reference samples and tested them on the Q230.