Posted on 02/04/2015 9:48:51 PM PST by Swordmaker
Look at this simple structure electric train made of just magnet,copper wire and a dry cell.
Just a cool, inexpensive scientific effect that might be fun to play with.
For the kids in all of us. . .
Now, that’s cool.
For the electric Universe PING list. . .
Well it is Electric. . . but not exactly Universal. However there is a point to it if you saw the latest video from Thunderbolts.info on Birkland currents and the coiled magnetic fields and how the flow moves through them.
Hey, that’s pretty cool!
I thought so. . . makes me want to go get some magnets, a battery, and some copper wire.
:) Definitely.
like
Nice.
Besides, where do you get copper coils like that? Would drive my cats crazy if I taped the ends together and let it run.
Buy some copper wire and wrap it around a dowel until you have enough. Pull the dowel out. Done. A lot easier than the two foot tall 40,000 turn Tesla secondary coil a made with 28 gauge copper wire I made when I was in Junior High School.
Probably a pretty good drain on the small battery, heavy current flow through a big, relatively low resistance coil, but still a kick.
so, representing the magnetic polarity of the magnets on the end, and the coil in the center, it has to be
+- -......+ -+
to run to the left, or
-+ -......+ +-
to run to the right.
-+ -......+ -+ and +- -......+ +-
won't go anywhere. I'm out on a limb here! But that's got to be right.
Another thing, when he connects both ends of the coil together, wouldn't it really be two coils in parallel with the battery (short one and one long) each drawing current?
Say, maglev ain’t expensive after all . . . !
Would be interesting to put a Compass next to the coil and observe the needle as the battery passed by.
Then it would be known if the larger of the two coils was causing a power loss of any significance.
You would think the 2nd coil (long one) is setting up a magnetic field that opposes the one created by the primary coil (shorter one), but I'm sleepy :)
Yes, a beautiful example of an argument from symmetry. If
+- +......- +- runs to the left, then
+- -......+ +- must run to the right,
but each of these is equivalent to itself under direction reversal and change of sign convention, which is arbitrary, so that can't be right.
Another thing, when he connects both ends of the coil together, wouldn't it really be two coils in parallel with the battery (short one and one long) each drawing current?
Yes, it looks like this:
...+ -+ +......- +- -...
where the front and back connect to form one coil. The coils share magnetic poles at each end because the current flows into and out of each in the same direction. So, they both act in the same direction, and the motion is reinforced. In the "nonworking" case we have
...+ -+ +......- -+ -... or
...+ +- +......- +- -...
but since the magnets cannot move toward or away from each other, this is still the nonworking case.
A friend of mine 20 years ago made chain mail to sell at Ren Faires. The easiest way to make the loops was to wind soft steel wire around a dowel using a drill motor clamped in a vice (and then he would slit the coil with a dreamed motor with a thin cutting wheel... diagonal pliers were a bit sloppy).
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