text: Eddy currents traditionally can be strong enough to heat metal.  I believe the only way to cause a metal to combine with oxygen would require an electric or flame arc to vaporize the material and have enough oxygen present to "burn metal." \n\nON THE OTHER HAND, it was a widely used practice in the later WWII and cold war days to check radar operation by chucking welding rods in front of the radar beam and watch them flash into non-existence like a flashbulb.  The rod would be instantly changed to plasma and burn with the air.  I think if your definition of eddy current includes the current produced in a high energy RF electromagnetic field, then YES, it CAN burn metal.  Radar tubes back in the day could be in the thousands to 1 megawatt range, which would instanly destroy any metallic or RF conductive object (bird) if it got close enough to the emitter.  If you put a crinkled piece of aluminum foil in your microwave, the edges will flash and burn from the eddy currents induced by the conduction of the RF energy from the magnetron in the oven.  \n\nEddy currents, however, are usally NOT associated with arcs.  Eddy currents usually apply to tranformer and motor designs where electromagnets are formed with sheet steel and have windings which generate the magnetic field.  Transformer laminations are insulated from one another to PREVENT eddy currents which are very high amperage, low voltage currents induced in the armatures or cores of transformers when magnetic fields alternate in the core.  If a 60 Hz transformer, say for an old amplifier, were made of a solid block, it would waste a lot of power in the core itself because of the eddy currents.  If you construct the core with laminated sheets, the eddy currents cannot flow from sheet to sheet, so you make a more efficient design. \n\nI hope this helps.