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The University of Virginia study showed high not ultra-low gauss magnetic applications reduced sports injuries if applied immediately after the trauma. This would seem to put the Beck device listed here, the hand-held paddle, into the potentially "good" category as it shoots a high-energy magnetic pulse. In other words, the low gauss non-polarized magnetic mattresses, etc. are not efficacious. Robert Beck's mag pulser is ridiculed but does create a high-energy magnetic field.

The passive magnetic water treatment showed only two instances of affecting scale. The good professor suggests getting a magnetic array to try it out and offers a website that provides magnetic arrays that attach to pipes. Pure Science fun, that one. Here's an excerpt of citations:

Klaus J. Kronenberg: "Experimental evidence for the effects of magnetic fields on moving water." IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol MAG-21, No. 3, Sept 1985 (2059-2061).

In this paper which is often cited as the classical original investigation of MWT, the author describes the changes in the morphology of calcium carbonate crystals formed by evaporation of water that has been passed through a sequence of several magnetic fields. The effect of the treatment is to change the crystals from a dendritic form to smaller disk-shaped forms (that presumably are less likely to form a scale-- but this is not tested.) The curious thing is that the water seems to "remember" the treatment-- evaporation and crystallization were carried out in a field-free environment. The need for the water to flow past a succession of magnets (up to 16) at a specific velocity prompts Kronenberg to suggest that "the interaction between the magnetic fields and the hydrogen bonds is amplified to the breaking point by resonance." The idea is that the breaking up of the (H2O)n complexes somehow releases dissolved ions that promote nucleation of the smaller crystals. The observed effect lasts for up to two days.

It is difficult to assess this paper. His experimental results are interesting (there are photographs of the crystals), but much of the interpretation strikes me as suspect. Even more off-putting is the quotation attributed to him in the section on agricultural applications.

The Effectiveness of a magnetic physical water treatment device on scaling in domestic hot-water storage tanks. C. Smith, P Coetzee and J. Meyers. Water SA 29(3) 2003. Available as a PDF download.

These South African authors have produced what strikes me as a very well-done study, one of the few that reports scientifically credible evidence for the effectiveness of MWT. Their series of experiments in which one of two parallel heaters was fitted with a permanant magnet device showed scale formation reductions varying over a rather wide range (17-70%), with an average of 34%.

Tests of non-chemical scale control devices in a once-through system. G.J.C. Limpert and J.L. Raber. Materials Performance, Vol. 24, No. 10, 40-45, (1985), Oct.

The abstract of this 10-year study at the 3M Corporation reads as follows:

"Experiments were conducted in a test heat exchanger system to evaluate 10 non-chemical scale and corrosion control devices. These devices may perform either by electrostatic, magnetic, electronic, or catalytic mechanisms. Chemical tests also compared results with non-chemical systems to insure the test conditions were not so severe that scale prevention was impossible. Water from a single deep well known to cause calcium carbonate scale when heated was used in all tests. The test heat exchanger was a two-tube shell and tube with steam applied to the shell side. Water flow was either in series or parallel through the two tubes,depending on the desired test conditions. No device tested significantly reduced the amount of scale formed, compared to the controls. Proprietary chemicals containing phosphorous reduced scale formation almost completely."

An internal report (PDF format) by a group of engineers at the U.S. Dept of Energy's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory describes a carefully-done series of experiments that failed to reveal any beneficial effects of MWT at one of their water treatment facilities.