Identifying Metals & Minerals with a Metal Detector

Identifying Metals: These include gold, silver, copper and any other metal that is valuable and non ferrous. These should respond to a metal detector as metallic, as long as they are in a conductive form and there is a sufficient amount to interfere with the electromagnetic field of the search coil.

Minerals: For all convenient reasons the only mineral that a metal detector will recognize as mineral are magnetic iron ore or black sand. It is very easy to test this whether the ore contains a predominance of either metal or mineral. If a sample of ore does not have neither metal nor mineral, the metal detector will not give any response.

A mineral response from the metal detector does not automatically show there is no metal there, but that there are more minerals present. When the sample gets a metallic response, you can be sure that it has metal in conductive form in such amounts that you should search the specimen very thoroughly. The capability of response of metal detectors with discrimination give these days make it one of the most important tools for being able to identify metal versus mineral.

There is a little bit of a possibility that a specimen could have electrically equal quantities and precise amounts of metal and mineral. In this sort of case, they would each neutralize or balance out the effects of the other, and an indication would not be obtained.

Remember that a specimen testing mineral, nonetheless, should not be discarded as containing some amount of metal; the results of the tests could have shown only a prevalence of mineral. If the specimen shows there is metal, you can be sure that it has some metal in conductive form in an amount enough to disturb the search coil’s electromagnetic field.