Frictionlittle Gear

[alan2here]

Depending on how you define friction something could arguably never be frictionless. However one could create a gear that removed contact friction other than between a solid and air magnetically.

 

Take a diamagnetic block of material with a cylindrical fixed magnet some distance above it, between these two items are a 2nd this time optional fixed diamagnetic block and a cylindrical floating magnet. The floating magnet is delicate, you could probably bend down to inspect it and breath on it too heavily knocking it off onto the magnet above or out of the edge of the experiment. However if careful one could get the floating magnet to levitate and spin slowly loosing speed due mainly to air resistance, it is far more efficient than a normal bearing however on it's own one would need to be imaginative to find a use for such a week bearing. There are few obvious variations you could do, most result in a less effective or totally non-functioning version of the same thing.

 

A potentially useful variation is a gear. One way to implement this would be a thin light probably plastic ring with a small number of spokes connecting it to the floating magnet as if the floating magnet were the center of a wheel. On the outside of the wheel would be a larger number of magnets. The magnets would need to be small enough and at great enough distance from the center of the experiment not to interfere much with the two central magnets, as is about to become clear they will also need to be sufficiently close to one another.

 

Duplicating the whole thing again but this time using a different number of outer magnets creates another gear of a different ratio.

 

As I could never build all of this myself I don't know this next part for sure, however having used magnets before it seems logical that correct orientation and alignment of the outer magnets, distance from each other and size of the gears could result in a system where ether nether sides pulled or pushed towards each other but instead found an optimal distance or both sides pushed away from one another but insufficiently to break the experiment.

 

This could allow both to rotate as gears do where one moves faster than the other.

 

Further removing of friction by holding the gears in a vacuum away from other metal objects would also be possible but would also make the experiment of less practical use.

[Edtharan]

There is a much simpler design.

 

If you make a spoke arrangement and place magnets on the ends of the spokes all facing the same direction (eg: all the north sides are aligning in the clockwise direction), then make another such arrangement but have the magnets aligned in the opposite direction (eg: all the north sides are aligned in a counter clockwise direction).

 

When these "gears" interlock, the magnets are arranged so that they always repel each other (north to north, south to south). This means as one spins, it pushed the magnets (and hence the spokes) of the other "gear" thus transferring the motion through the gear chain.

 

Mount these one magnetic bearings and you have a very low friction system.

[npts2020]

You might significantly reduce friction in gear transfer but then your main source would be from whatever shaft your gear is attached in order to do work. Frictionless gears would be a very useful engineering device, though. Isn't the problem of keeping a mass centered in a magnetic field one of the problems in using fusion power as well?

[alan2here]

Mount these one magnetic bearings and you have a very low friction system.

Magnetic bearings are ether contact bearings thus relatively high friction, are powered by electricity or require very low temperatures. Other than that your design is similar to my one. My design would also be more sensitive to both non rotational force and interactions with the center magnets applied by the outer magnets.

 

You might significantly reduce friction in gear transfer but then your main source would be from whatever shaft your gear is attached in order to do work

There is no shaft, the center of the wheel levitates.

 

This is a daft picture, the static magnet at the top doesn't need to be so large and far away and the wooden rig doesn't need to be so large but it does show the effect in action, the tiny magnet at the bottom is the one levitating.

http://www.ian.org/Magnetics/Wooden-MagLev-Frame.jpg

Edited October 31, 2008 by alan2here
multiple post merged

[npts2020]

There is no shaft, the center of the wheel levitates

 

Ok, but how do you get any work out of it without attaching it to something? If you have eliminated the friction between gears, that something becomes the main frictional drag in the system. Levitation is the easy part, using it to do useful work a little harder.

[John Cuthber]

Woulldnt all those accelerating magnets lose energy from the system by emitting electromagnetic radiation?

[alan2here]

Ok, but how do you get any work out of it without attaching it to something?

Admittedly connecting the two friction-little gears together is an interesting prof of concept but of no real use. Connecting them to anything conventional creates loads of friction. The rest of the system could of course be friction-little. I can't think of a use for it tbh other than intellectual curiosity.

 

Wouldn't all those accelerating magnets lose energy from the system by emitting electromagnetic radiation?

It never occurred to me but presumably it would. It would also suffer from air resistance, non-perfect construction and eddy currents in nearby metallic objects.

 

I wonder if one could harness extraordinary speeds you can spin a strong magnet with PGraphite by keeping on increasing it's speed by for example blowing air past it to create HZ\KHZ?\MHZ? magnetic only electromagnetic waves?

Edited November 1, 2008 by alan2here

[John Cuthber]

I don't think you can get magnetic waves without an electric effect too.

Also, the fastest you can get something moving with a jet of air is the sopeed of the molecules in that air- roughly the speed of sound. So you end up with a tangential velocity of roughly mach 1. The frequency that gives rise to is about the same as a musical wind or woodwind isntrument the same size as the rotor. For a rotor about an inch caross you would have freqencies comparable with a dog-whistle i.e. a few tens of KHz. This isn't going to give a very high frequency unless the devide is very small, then it won't generate much radiation.

[alan2here]

tyvm :¬)

 

Do you mean that magnetic only waves won't propagate, they won't interact in a conventional way with EM wave technology or that they can't be made only magnetic by creating them with alternating electricity?

 

If they are possible then are the properties of 40khz magnetic only waves likely to lead to anything interesting?

 

Connecting two of these gears together at a ratio of 6:1 (or 60:10) possibly housing the whole thing in a vacuum and getting the first one up to speed using another method gives the faster gear a (based on a few tens of 10khz could mean 40khz) 240khz output?

 

Getting more than two gears connected to each other requires in my mind ether an exponentially growing amount of space and implausibly light materials or a thin hole to be drilled though the PGraphite sheet with a very thin rod going downwards and then connecting at sufficient distance to another wheel.

 

40khz * 6 * 6 = 1.440 mhz

Longwave radio starts at 148.5khz