The plan was to test for magnetism as soon as the ECCO samples arrived from India, however, they arrived in the post whilst we were in the middle of a booked session at Masaryk University performing SEM and EDX - so we took advantage of that to get a look at their appearance and make up.
Today, they were presented to a Samsung Galaxy S7s magnetic sensor, and here is the result
The main event
Right at the end of the set of samples, the sample labelled 'Final fuel 1st batch' was repeatedly able to change the values on the phones magnetometer - then the camera battery died.
Switching cameras, some more tests were conducted as you can see below...
What is going on??
Why would only fuel batch one show this behaviour? The fuel samples are wet slurries, how would this effect the magnetic properties? The grains are mobile, yet the effect does seem to be directional, how is this possible, even when squeezed and bent... is it self aligning?
I think we will need to look at the SEM/EDX data for these samples and see what separates them.
Is this a magnetized nickel powder?
Well, it is more of a slurry. There is Nickel in there, so could be, interesting though that only this one sample has this property.