Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi I'm loonygirl1395, from butuan city philippines...

I'm starting earlier on my next science project... I want to e\invent something... while my friend and i were at the science fair, we were interested with a project which applied maglev to an automobile (prototype).. now i want to apply that concept to make a levitating platform that would be like a tray which could lift weights and can move back and forth...

I just want to ask some advice and ideas you can add on my concept so i can tell it to my (Future) teammates for next year's science fair...

You need to understand Earnshaw's theorem and the stability issues with magnetic levitation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_levitation contains a brief introduction and has some hot links to more material. Without an understanding of how you might be able to stabilize things in your specific application, you are likely doomed to failure. The largest scale usage of magnetic levitation that I know of are some trains where the track provides a means of controlling the stability in all but forward and backward directions.

If you are to use an automobile you would need to calculate the loads that the car would push on the magnetic field and find a magnetic field strong enough to counters the car's. For an example with your platform would need to have a magnetic field that counter the force from the weights. It involves physics equations but you can do it.
Can you give me more information as to your procedure in experimentations of your project? Then I can help you on your project some more.


Thanks,
Yasin