Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

Maglev Train Design and Electro-magnets

Status
Not open for further replies.

Clyd3

New Member
Hi, I need to build a maglev (magnetic levitation) train for school... I have to show many different ideas and then choose the best, while my information can come from anywhere (hopefully here)...
The ideas I have come up with are as follows:
1. Permanent magnets for train and track
2. Permanent magnets for train and electromagnets on track for varied strength.
3. Electromagnets on train and track (for varied strength)
4. For the last option (the most complicated), I thought of using a permanent magnet track and contolled electromagnet train, which "changes polarity" by using a 555 timer or something (if possible, although this will require a very low frequency...) Reason being, because with all the trains except this one, you have to start them by pushing them, and can only stop the electromagnet trains (in a disasterous way)
If anyone knows where I can get info on electro-magnets(and their spelling), maglev trains(and their spelling) has any ideas about the timer circuit for option 4 or has any ideas, comments or wisdom to share please do, because all of it is needed and will be greatly appreciated (including help with spelling)... Thanks...
 
Clyd3 said:
Hi, I need to build a maglev (magnetic levitation) train for school... I have to show many different ideas and then choose the best, while my information can come from anywhere (hopefully here)...
The ideas I have come up with are as follows:
1. Permanent magnets for train and track
2. Permanent magnets for train and electromagnets on track for varied strength.
3. Electromagnets on train and track (for varied strength)
4. For the last option (the most complicated), I thought of using a permanent magnet track and contolled electromagnet train, which "changes polarity" by using a 555 timer or something (if possible, although this will require a very low frequency...) Reason being, because with all the trains except this one, you have to start them by pushing them, and can only stop the electromagnet trains (in a disasterous way)
If anyone knows where I can get info on electro-magnets(and their spelling), maglev trains(and their spelling) has any ideas about the timer circuit for option 4 or has any ideas, comments or wisdom to share please do, because all of it is needed and will be greatly appreciated (including help with spelling)... Thanks...

The world leader in linear motor technology was the UK scientist "Eric Braithwaite", although I understand rights now belong to the Japanese?.

The demonstrations I saw years back, used an aluminium plate flying backwards and forwards down a track of electromagnets. The design of the electo-magnets provided movement (by a travelling wave down the magnets), lift (by induced currents in the aluminium), and was even held in place sideways by the magnetic field. The aluminium plate was just that, a plain rectancular sheet of aluminium - there were no wheels or guides, everything was done by the magnetic field - obviously, for actual use, some kind of safety guide system is required - or power cuts are really bad news :lol:
 
If the train can have some contacts in the track.Thean is the soution electo mecanical:

The train wil keep goin faster if yu use this soluiton.
It cod use the princip of a electric motor.Traion has magnets the levetat it and push.On the track are litle pates as contacts:
--- ++
--- ++
--- ++
++ ---
++ ---
++ ---
--- ++
--- ++
--- ++

- Negative plate + Positive plate
 
I need more info :x (Also found cool magnet site)

Please give me more info on magnets and stuff, I know a lot of you know quite a bit more thn you are showing bey not responding, help me....
I found a cool magnet site with piles of info and cool projects and stuff...
**broken link removed** it is an excellent source of info...
 
Typo error,

UK scientist "Eric Braithwaite",


Should read "Eric Laithwaite"

Obituary for the late Professor Eric Laithwaite - 12/31/97
From the 'Electronic Daily Telegraph'
Obituaries - Saturday 6 December 1997 - Professor Eric Laithwaite

Scientist who used linear motors to drive hovering trains but was then branded a crank for defying Newton.

PROFESSOR ERIC LAITHWAITE, the electrical engineer who has died aged 76, spent his career investigating unusual forms of mechanical propulsion and championing the linear induction motor.

Linear motors, which Laithwaite described as "no more than an ordinary electrical motor spread out", generate magnetic fields on which an object can rest and travel without being slowed by friction. Their principle had long been known, but it was Laithwaite who pioneered their commercial development, using them to drive both transport and industrial machinery.

His first patent, taken out in 1948, used a linear motor to propel the shuttle across a loom in a mill, a process that had fascinated him since his boyhood in Lancashire.

Following the invention of the hovercraft in 1959, there was throughout the 1960s and early 1970s considerable government interest in developing new forms of high-speed mass transport. Laithwaite first tried to power transport with linear motors in 1962, when he was teaching at Manchester University and was a consultant to British Railways.

At the Gorton works, he managed to accelerate a plate-layer's trolley to 30 mph before it had travelled 30 yards. However, he soon became disillusioned with BR's lack of funding for the project - a complaint that became a refrain in his career - and in 1967 resigned to join their rivals, Tracked Hovercraft.

He persuaded the Government, which was worried about similar technological advances being made by the French, to invest 35.25 million in a project that combined the principles of linear motors and hovercraft. The "Hovertrain" was to be a high-speed train without wheels, resting on a cushion of air and driven by U-shaped magnets which fitted like a saddle over a metal plate in the centre of the track. This generated a magnetic field which pushed the train forward. A prototype reached over 100 mph on a length of track in the Fens.

The press predicted the imminent building of a monorail that would whisk passengers from the Cromwell Road Air Terminal to London Airport in eight minutes.

Yet in 1973 the Hovertrain project was abruptly cancelled, with the Aerospace Minister Michael Heseltine telling a Select Committee that its practical applications had not been proven.

Laithwaite's ideas, of no use to the British Government, were rapidly picked up by the Japanese and Germans as the oil crisis began to bite. Undaunted, Laithwaite continued to develop his theories and soon replaced the hovercraft principle with magnetic levitation. This relied on the repelling power of like poles of magnets to lift and move a craft along a track at speed. Although "Maglev" trains were relatively cheap, only one was built in Britain, at Birmingham airport. Japan and Germany were again quicker to see the benefits.

For the next 20 years, the costs of Maglev and controversy surrounding Laithwaite's thinking on other scientific matters (notably the propelling qualities of gyroscopes) meant his work on linear motors was ignored.

Magnetic levitation was relegated from the frontier of technology to a place as one of Q's toys in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) - Major Boothroyd uses it to propel a tray at decapitating speed.

Last month, however, after several years of trying, Laithwaite and his colleagues at Sussex University persuaded Nasa that linear motors represented a more efficient alternative to the rockets used to launch spacecraft into orbit, and his team was awarded a contract to design a launch system.

Eric Roberts Laithwaite was born at Atherton, Lancashire, on June 14 1921. His father was a farmer. He was educated at Kirkham Grammar School, the Regent Street Polytechnic and Manchester University. From 1941 to 1946 he served with the RAF, working for three years on automatic pilot systems at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough.

He then returned to Manchester University and in 1950 was appointed an assistant lecturer there, remaining until he became Professor of Heavy Electrical Engineering at Imperial College, London, in 1964. The initial public interest in linear motors, combined with Laithwaite's wry fluency in explaining his ideas without being abstruse or patronising, made him a familiar figure on radio and television in the 1970s.

He wrote several books for a lay readership, including Exciting Electrical Machines (1974) and, with Professor M W Thring, How to Invent (1977). This set out his rules for inventors, including the ability to bully oneself to work, and a gift for serendipity.

But it was this high profile that contributed to his academic downfall and the controversy that dominated the last decade of his tenure at Imperial College. In 1974 Laithwaite was invited to give a Royal Institution lecture and chose to demonstrate his observations on gyroscopic force, including the seeming ability of gyrosopes to pull themselves along without being pushed.

With the heretical cry "Look, it's lost weight", Laithwaite showed how he could, without effort, raise a 50 lb spinning gyroscope above his head on the end of a long handle. It was a scientific oddity that Laithwaite thought would intrigue his colleagues.

Instead he began to be discredited, charged with challenging Newton's Laws on action and reaction and with cranky, unrigorous thinking. His lecture was the first not to be published by the Royal Institution and his nomination to the Royal Society was withdrawn.

His cause was not helped by the press, which wrote of his discovery of an "anti-gravity device" and "space drives", or the revelation that his interest in gyroscopes stemmed from a dream recounted to him by an amateur inventor.

Laithwaite retired from Imperial College in 1986, but was offered no other research post until 1990, when he became Visiting Professor at Sussex University. There he explored his ideas on space propulsion and raged at what he called the tragedy of "the Age of the Accountant, where there was no room for Isambard Kingdom Brunel".

He was also a keen entomologist and the co-author of The Dictionary of Butterflies and Moths (1975); he had one of the finest British collections of specimens. He married, in 1951, Sheila Gooddie; they had two sons and two daughters.
 
tansis said:
Typo error,

UK scientist "Eric Braithwaite",


Should read "Eric Laithwaite"

Obituary for the late Professor Eric Laithwaite - 12/31/97
From the 'Electronic Daily Telegraph'
Obituaries - Saturday 6 December 1997 - Professor Eric Laithwaite

Sorry about that :lol:

I was going ffom memory, from watching the Christmas Lectures years ago! - I'm sorry to hear he's died :cry:
 
Don't tell anyone that you've seen the Laithwaite christmas lecture!
The royal institute is still upset by that demonstration with the 50lb gyroscope.
 
tansis said:
Don't tell anyone that you've seen the Laithwaite christmas lecture!
The royal institute is still upset by that demonstration with the 50lb gyroscope.

I don't remember the gyroscope, as far as I can remember the one I saw was all about linear motors.

I also don't see why the Royal Institute should get upset over a demonstratable effect - it's that kind of thinking which holds the human race back (which could explain a lot!)
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top