Week 17

In this week we are continuing with the meausurement of the experiment, after looking closer at the data obtained, we are having trouble being able to identify how the relationship between it´s magnetic power and it´s core are related. 

It seems that some magnets are of different material. Even if they have no noticiable difference at human meausuremnts, having the same color and weight and only changing in it´s electromagneticity.

We have taken the experiment for third time, and the results continue the same way...

Magnets (from smaller to bigger)	Weight (g)	Weight (g)
Manget 1	0,6909	0,7259
Manget 2	0,6388	0,7823
Manget 3	1,1258	0,8400
Manget 4	0,7468	0,7594
Manget 5	0,3763	0,6130
Manget 6	0,3761	0,8931
Manget 7	0,4599	0,9550

Theorethically magnet 3 is the most powerful one, being followed by the fourth. Taken into account that the core gets bigger as the number does, 7 must be much more powerful than 7, but it´s the other way round...

Week 16

This week we have had problems at the start of the class because we were having classes in another place (an issue related with our tables needed for second of bachillerato BI exams) and our "new" classroom was closed. We had there the electromagnets, the laptops and the lab coats so we need to find a way to obtain them again.

Finally we have our materials, so we are now working and collecting data for our first experiment. We are measuring the amount of iron powder taken with an extremely precise balance. 

A new idea on how to meausure the power of the magnet has been shown; it consist on putting the magnet and the iron dust at a distance and joining them little by little in order to know the size of the field. Finally we have discarted this method as the rugossity of the table and ourselves can create great errors on the experiment.

Fixed the older method, we have discovered that the distance between the last coil and the end of the magnet influences the magnetic attraction, so we have to measure again the electromagnets which have been affected by this new variable (we are going to change it for the next week so we can maintain this as a constant). We can't use this data as this new variable has affected some of the electromagnets. Guess we will have to repeat it again, hope this time it works...

Week 15

In this week we are going to try the magnets using an old 15 V battery, and surprisingly they are going well. However we can can only go up to 6 V without overloading the battery (because of the high intensity of the current), so we have decided not to do the part of the experiment in which we change the voltage for no, and if we do it, we are going to firstly try to improve the maximun voltage reachen.

We have decided to measure the strength of the magnet by the quantity of iron powder (measured in weight) that it can lift from a Petri plate. After rising it, we disconnect the current from the magnet and the powder will fall on another Petri plate and then we weight it in a precision balance (which gives four decimals) to know the exact iron powder lifted.
We will put 200g of iron powder in the first Petri plate. The biggest magnets are suppose to take more iron powder than the other because of the higher attraction that it performs as it´s nucleus is wider (it must have a higher magnetic field, as the rest of the constants are controlled). There's a little problem about the powder left in the magnet when disconnecting the current, some of it will still be attached to it because even if the magnet is disconnected, some magnetism is left in it, but we can easily make them fall with a little spoon, and no powder will get stuck in it.

This is what is happening to the iron powder in the petri plate (but in a quite lower way)

Week 14

Today we are going to test the magnets that we did the last week. We have also found a new power supply which reaches up to 1000 V because with the power supply we had before, we couldn't do the third part of the experiment (the part in where we change the voltage) because a difference of 1 V would be inappreciable, due to the fact that the old power supply overloads at more than 5 V, and with this number of volts, the variability is minimal.

The new power supply doesn't seem to work at all so we are in the same point that before, not reaching neither 5 neither none volt (we reached them, but the magnet didn´t worked at all, so no current was given to it). We are having a serious group discussion on if only using 1-5V will be a good idea, and after speaching to Mr Gaving King (Which knows a lot about magnets) we tried to fix the magnets problems in order to reach more than 5 V... We had no real success but at least we have learned possible errors we have not commited and others that may become handy the next week...

Week 13

Back from Christmas!! Happy new year!!
In this week we are going to make some more magnets. We had problems with the wire we were using sowe are going to use another type of wire (insulated one). This wire has several advantages:
1)It will be more safe when we start using it with electricity.
2) Easier to find, so we make sure we will not run out of it
3)It is actually more resistant, so there are less possibilities that it brakes (as it happened with the other wire).
4)It has a certain insulation, maybe that can give us the oportunity to give it more volts!

The main problem is that the already made magnets must be changed. However we have ended making all the magnets needed so we are ready to make the experiment on the next lesson, we have made, as we have planned,  20 turns on each and with the core diameter we chosen so we are following the procedure without any trouble (For now).
Turning the wires may sound straightforward but it actually takes a lot of time as lot of times must be done for each one, being a easy but laboriouse work.

Week 12

This last week before Christmas we are doing some more testing on the magnets. We have burned a resistance of 100v (again) and it has burned again, this time with smoke, so we had to quickly turn of the power supply for safety. The magnet works pretty well though without any resistance, however it overloads to fast and we can only reach 5v, need to solve it thought....

With a resistance of 1000 and the one of 560 the magnet don't work at all so we weren´t able to solve it by using a higher resistance.

We are trying to use a new machine that can vary the amount of resistance, it will be better than trying all resistor (and we will not risk burning them). We are hoping that this doesn't burn either!

                                     (Burned resistor, as you can see, now useless)

Week 11

Today, the new criterias had been introduced to us, apart from the older ones. In this trimester we are going to do part of the experiment, colecting some of the data. We have been making some magnets today. The wire that we are going to use is a normal current cable composed of more or less 30 little wires joined together, as a result, a thicker wire.
We were able to to do some quick tests to our new magnets, and we haver realised that the power supplies overpowers too quickly, we have even tried to use a 100v resistor to make it work, but it started to smell like if it was burning, and in fact it seems it was...