Dangerous High-speed Magnetic Levitation MaglevShow Video Details ↓ [noise] … …William Beaty: Here is a device I've been calling fantastically dangerous mechanical maglev. Fantastically dangerous because it's got 2 copper cylinders spinning very, very fast. If you touched it it would probably eat your arm all the way up to the shoulder but... I thought of this thing in about 1989 when I was on an airplane flight working for Dynamation going down to San Lois Obisbo realized in the cleft of 2 rotating copper cylinders if we could put a super magnet it should levitate so let's try it. [noise] … … I found that it has to go very fast before the magnet will lift off. [noise] Faster, faster Igor. [noise] Turn it all the way up. [noise] [noise] … … … … … I've painted a little white spot on the copper so with a photocell and a flashlight and an oscilloscope I should be able to measure the speed, the surface speed of the metal. [noise] … 97.3 hertz and these tubes are about 1.3 inch diameter, it's the heavy stuff, schedule 80 copper. I spreadsheeted that and it works out to be about 24 miles an hour that it's going, a lot slower than I thought but it is around 6000 RPM. This is an example of inductive levitation as when a maglev train flies over an aluminum slab. The relative motion of the metal past the magnet induces a huge electric current in the metal surface and that creates its own magnetic field which pushes upwards on the magnet and levitates it. I've heard that in this kind of setup the magnets repelled from the end of the spinning tubes. I can't see that in my own version because I've got steel bearings and I get sucked right in. I also think that this will attract a magnet so if I turn it upside down it might stabilize a magnet and let it hang under the rotating tubes in 3 dimensions. I'll have to try it. [noise] … … |