Giant Magnetoresistance Have you ever sat around on a rainy day contemplating your computer’s hard disk drive? Though often taken for granted, this magnetized device makes it possible to store and retrieve information digitally – in everything from video games to iPods to your personal computer. The first hard disk drives (HDDs) date back to [...]
Permanent Magnets: A Study in Sticktoitiveness There are two basic kinds of magnets permanent and temporary. We'll take on permanent first which is appropriate, because before humans could invent and exploit temporary magnets, they had to discover the permanent kind first. People first happened upon magnets sometime before 600 BC with the discovery of the [...]
Hybrid Magnets: Best of Both Worlds Unlike most of the math that goes on at the Magnet Lab, the equation you need to make a more powerful continuous field magnet is pretty easy. Take a very powerful superconducting magnet say, 11.5 tesla and a very powerful resistive magnet say, 33.5 tesla and put them together. [...]
Superconducting Magnets: Power Unplugged Superconductivity is a very cool phenomenon in which electrical resistance is overcome with the help of very cold temperatures colder than anything this side of Pluto! Most superconducting magnets are made using an alloy called niobium-titanium "Ni-Ti" for short. You could think of it this way: In a superconducting current, the [...]
How linear motors work? In a traditional DC electric motor, a central core of tightly wrapped magnetic material (known as the rotor) spins at high speed between the fixed poles of a magnet (known as the stator) when an electric current is applied. In an AC induction motor, electromagnets positioned around the edge of the [...]
