De-Magnetising a Ships Hull Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

De-Magnetising a Ships Hull - Essay Example The soft iron parts get temporarily magnetized due to the influence of horizontal and vertical components of earth's magnetic field which flows through the huge ship when kept on the harbor for a long time. [1] So the entire ship behaves like a magnetic after construction for which it is subjected to two types of dangers. Firstly, the magnetic compass will not work correctly inside the ship and secondly the ship will be affected by magnetic mines inside the water. So we have to remove ship's magnetism and the process is called degaussing. Above all we have to place magnets and magnetic materials on each side of the compass inside the ship to keep its direction exactly towards the magnetic meridian. It is a process to remove ship's magnetism. [3] This is done by winding few turns of insulated wire around the ship and passing a heavy current so as to create an opposite magnetic field to that of the ship's magnetic field. This will remove ship's magnetism by the demagnetization process. A steel hulled ship is like a huge floating magnet with large magnetic field surrounding it as the ship moves through the water, this field also moves. The ship can act as a trigger device for magnetic sensitive ordnance or devices, which are designed to detect these distortions.