What types of metal do not attract a magnet?

Answer 1

Most metals are not attracted by magnets. The only common ones strongly attracted to a magnet are cobalt, nickel and iron (steel is mostly iron). Examples of non-magnetic metals are iron and copper.

Answer 2

Metals that are not attracted by by magnets are Non Ferrous metals.

Metals that can be magnets and are picked up by magnets are ferrous metals, IE they contain iron (Fe)

steel, aluminum, and something else!

Answer:

Metals with iron in them are magnetic. Most others are not, for example, copper, brass, tin, aluminum, calcium, and so forth

Answer 3

Simple Answer:
One can not easily predict the magnetic properties of a material based on the elements of which it is made. It is like baking a cake, you don't know if you put the ingredients together whether it will work until you try it and then if someone else does it a little differently, they may get a different result.

It is easy enough to say that silver, gold, aluminum and copper are examples of nonmagnetic metals, but the fact is that almost everything is a nonmagnetic material in the common use of the term where "nonmagnetic" means you can not pick it up with a magnet. Since two thirds of the Periodic Table is deemed "metallic," one can pretty much go down the list and include sodium, potassium, lithium, magnesium, calcium, and on and on and just skip the few elements that are commonly employed in magnetic materials.

Materials with a large magnetic response are typically made from iron, nickel, cobalt and manganese and their alloys. So-called

rare earth materials that can have greater magnetic response, include yttrium, samarium, gadolinium and cobalt.

Even iron does do not guarantee magnetic properties. Stainless steel, for instance is 70-90% iron, but also contains 10-20% chromium and sometimes 10% of a combination of nickel, manganese, carbon or molybdenum. Once the chromium concentration gets above 16% stainless steel is nonmagnetic and that is why your magnets don't stick to some refrigerators.

More Background:
All materials show some degree of magnetic response; everything, e.g.

liquids, solids, gasses, metals, plastic, dirt. Sometimes these materials are attracted by magnets, sometimes repelled. Sometimes these material can maintain their own magnetism (i.e.

be permanent magnets) and sometimes not.

In everyday language, if one says an object is magnetic, then one usually means it is attracted to a permanent magnet with enough force that it can be made to stick to the magnet. The object may be a permanent magnet itself or not in this common usage.

Materials that do not have atoms/molecules with unpaired electrons are pretty much guaranteed to have a small response to a magnetic field. (Everything has some magnetic response, just not necessarily large enough to notice.) Even so, materials composed of atoms with an unpaired electron will only sometimes exhibit a large magnetic response. It ultimately depends on the details of the electronic structure of the bulk material and can not be predicted with any accuracy based on looking at the periodic table.

Generally, materials with a strong magnetic response contain atoms with unpaired electrons. Unpaired electrons is a favorable characteristic, but not a guarantee of magnetic properties. Having unpaired electrons is a characteristic of every odd numbered element of the periodic table. Chemists usually designate the left two-thirds

of the periodic table as "metals," the implication being that if the atoms are brought together in large numbers they form materials that conduct electricity.

Materials with a large magnetic response are typically made from iron, nickel, cobalt and manganese and their alloys. So-called

rare earth materials that can have greater magnetic response, include yttrium, samarium, gadolinium and cobalt.

As stated in the beginning, creating materials with desired magnetic properties has largely been a matter of trial and error. Today, there are highly sophisticated computer models based on the theory quantum mechanics for electrons in solids which can do a reasonably good job of predicting the magnetic and other properties of solids. The theoretical and computational physics behind this has been going on for more than half a century.

Answer 4

Only four elements: nickel, cobalt, iron and manganese are paramagnetic. Alloys containing these elements may be magnetic - depending on the amounts present. All other metals and their alloys are not.

Answer 5

Non-ferrous (=metals not containing iron) are usually not magnetic.

Answer 6

Pure gold, silver, Mercury, steel, Aluminum and several others.

Answer 7

Many metals are not attracted or repulsed by magnetic fields.

Examples include copper, aluminium and sodium

Answer 8

Steel, copper and brass I think

Answer 9

Tin. stainless steel

Answer 10

Tin

Stainless steel