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how do i make a MAGLEV TRAIN MODEL?
I WANT TO pass a project by making a model of a maglev train. how do i make it?
Well, the first thing that you need to know is that, while it is very easy to get repulsion, it is very difficult to get an ‘equilibrium’ — a stable height and stable energy state for your magnetostatic system. I remember that my professor at Cornell had a delightful setup with a set of magnets and a levitating ball, and he was showing me how inside, the system actually had to be actively controlled by some simple circuits because the ball always wanted to fall outside of its magnetic “trap”.
You might be able to do a little better with a train model, since you’ve got an axis of freedom for the train to move. (That is, if the above theorem says “there is always some direction that the object can fall” then we’re going to make that direction on-axis. It might work.)
My first setup would be to take a thin piece of wood, maybe a 2×4, and lay it so that its edge points “up”, and then try to build a wooden train which straddles it. Try to make the sides attractive and the top repulsive or so, to see whether you can get a bit of stability. If the train and track were too short, then it would obviously just fall “around” the track, so that’s what I mean by using the axis to cancel out the degree of freedom. But what worries me about this setup is keeping the sides of the train from attracting into the track.
Wikipedia can help you with the design of professional maglev trains, but those are designed to go at very high speeds and usually have AC circuit components. I think you want something simpler here, something that can in principle be done with flat refrigerator magnets.
In this case, Wiki makes this case: that the track must have a set of alternating magnets in which the train sits:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maglev_Propulsion.svg
Here the train has what’s called a “quadrupole moment”, so that it doesn’t want to *attract* to the track but instead wants to *rotate* toward the track. The trick is, the left side wants to rotate to the left and the right side wants to rotate to the right, which hopefully meet together in a sort of happy equilibrium.
