Free Science Experiments

How to Make a Simple Electric Motor

Energy is available in many forms. Electric energy can be changed into useful work, or mechanical energy, through machines called electric motors. Electric motors work because of electromagnetic interactions: the interaction of current (the flow of electrons) along with a magnetic field.
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How to Make a Simple Electric MotorProblem

Learn how to make a simple electric motor.
Supplies
D battery
Insulated 22G wire
two large-eyed, long, metal sewing needles (the eyes should be large enough to fit the cable through)
Modeling clay
Electrical tape
Pastime knife
Small circular magnet
Thin gun
Give your coil a spin. What goes on? What happens when you spin the coil within the other direction? What would happen to have a bigger magnet? A bigger battery? Heavier wire?
Results
The motor will still spin when pushed in the correct direction. The motor will not spin once the initial push is in the reverse direction.
Why?
The metal, needles, and wire created a closed loop circuit that may carry current. Current flows from the negative terminal of the battery, through the circuit, and towards the positive terminal of the battery. Current inside a closed loop also creates its personal magnetic field, which you can determine through the “Right Hand Rule. ” Making a “thumbs up” sign together with your right hand, the thumb points toward the current, and the curve of the fingers show which way the permanent magnetic field is oriented.
In our situation, current travels through the coil a person created, which is called the armature from the motor. This current induces a magnetic field within the coil, which helps explain why the actual coil spins.

Magnets have two rods, north, and south. North-south interactions stay together, and north-north and south-south interactions repel one another. Because the magnetic field created by the current in the wire is not perpendicular towards the magnet taped to the battery, at least some the main wire’s magnetic field will repel and cause the coil to keep to spin.

So why did we have to remove the insulation from only one side of every wire? We need a way to periodically break the circuit in order that it pulses on and off in time using the rotation of the coil. Otherwise, the copper coil’s magnetic field would align using the magnet’s magnetic field and stop shifting because both fields would attract one another.

 The way we set up our engine causes it to be so that whenever current is moving with the coil (giving it a magnetic field), the coil is in a good position to be repelled by the stationary magnet’s magnetic field. Whenever the coil isn’t being actively repelled (during those moment intervals where the circuit is changed off), momentum carries it around until it’s within the right position to complete the signal, induce a new magnetic field, and become repelled by the stationary magnet once again.
Once moving, the coil can still spin until the battery is lifeless. The reason that the magnet only spins in a single direction is because spinning in the incorrect direction will not cause the magnetic fields to repel one another, but attract.

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