Electromagnets - How Do They Work?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2017-05-06
·
990 words · ~4 min read
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you might think that magnetism might only matter to three kinds of people
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physics professors the refrigerator industry and Insane Clown posy fans but
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magnetic forces are actually responsible for so many things that we take for
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granted in Modern Life including that sweet gaming rig next to you and that
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phone in your back pocket now for a long
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time electricity and magnetism were thought to be unrelated phenomena but as
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our scientific understanding evolved over the years we found that electricity
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and magnetism were part of the same fundamental Force called you guessed it
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electromagnetism one of the four basic forces that make just about everything
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in the universe possible now every
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electric current produces a magnetic field from the tiny traces on your
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motherboard to huge high voltage power lines that carry electricity across
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great distances but this effect is usually weak enough that it's not
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obvious or impactful so when we want to
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harness magnetism so we can actually do
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useful stuff with it the conventional way to achieve this is to Loop a wire
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carrying a current around and around many times in order to concentrate the
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magnetic field then if you want to get really fancy with a nice strong magnet
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you can Loop the wire around a magnetic core iron is great for this this is a
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pretty simple concept but it forms the basis for many modern electromagnets
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making the electromagnetic force an incredibly versatile tool especially
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since you can control how strong the magnet is simply by changing the number
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of turns or coils of wire or by
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adjusting how much electricity is flowing through them but lonus all I've
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ever seen electromagnets used for is picking up cars or scrap metal at the
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junkyard how's that relevant to me well
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for starters that hard drive that's probably clicking away inside your
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computer right now relies on electromagnets to read and write data it
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has tiny little heads that look like the needle ARM on a record player that are
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really just small electromagnets that Orient the magnetic domains in the
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spinning hard drive platter a certain way as it flies past to represent the
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zeros and ones of data though current
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hard drives rely on thin films rather than conventional coils for writing yay
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progress on to another example what if
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all that computer use has led to some sort of repetitive strain injury well
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your doctor might use magnetic resonance imaging better known as MRI to have a
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look at the inside of your hand this works by using a very strong magnetic
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fields to excite protons in your body which then actually give off radio waves
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that can be captured to form an image
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and then when you're done with your uh Imaging and it's time to go home the
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ease of varying the strength of an electromagnet as I mentioned before has
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even made travel via maglev train
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possible electromagnetics attached to the bottoms of these trains push the
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entire train up and forward allowing
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them to hover over a metal Rail and in doing so travel without friction so
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thanks to this the fastest maglev trains today can travel at 270 M or 430 km per
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hour fast enough to rival some turboprop
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airliners but even if you've never ridden a maglev or had to stick an
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appendage in an MRI machine you've still benefited from electromagnets as they
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actually supply nearly all of the world's electricity whether most of your
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country's energy comes from coal oil hydroelectric solar wind or nuclear
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almost all power plants eventually convert whatever kind of energy source
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they use into mechanical energy they use that to drive a turbine which
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spins a coil of wire surrounded by a large powerful you guessed it magnet
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this causes an electrical current to flow through the wire which is sent to
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the electrical grid and ultimately to your house so while watching this
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episode of Techquickie isn't exactly the same as getting your PhD in physics
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hopefully you now understand the fundamentals of electromagnets and how
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do they work and you didn't even need to talk to a scientist to do it
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speaking of how they work are you a
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to freshbooks.com tequ which is linked below and enter ing Techquickie in the
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how did You Hear About Us section so thanks for watching guys if you likeed
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