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FSU Sets 7 World Records In High Magnetics Research

Posted by timothy on Mon Sep 08, 2003 02:16 AM
from the research-and-fun dept.
Toys Science Technology
spence calder writes "FSU's High Magnetic Field Lab, more specifically my Kenpo teacher, just broke 7 world records, and brought the record for a superconducting magnet to 25 Tesla. Check it out at FSView and a more detailed article here. Now if only our football team was that cool." And if you'd like your magnetic toys to shoot metal bits, Jason Rollette points to his railgun project, which looks like good, clean, high-voltage fun.
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  • /. = Server Railgun (Score:3, Funny)

    by l810c (551591) * on Monday September 08 2003, @02:19AM (#6897867)
    Jason's Blog has tons of cool pictures And video. I doubt it holds up.

  • 25 Tesla? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Read Icculus (606527) on Monday September 08 2003, @02:21AM (#6897873)
    That'll keep those damn Americans off my base.

    FP

  • "...good, clean, high-voltage fun." (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08 2003, @02:26AM (#6897887)
    Yep, Alfred Nobel probably said a similar thing when inventing dynamite.
  • A powerful superconducting magnet at higer temperatures is always welcome. MRI and NMR people can now rejoice! more powerful magnetic fields mean better instruments right?

    • Re:Congratulations (Score:5, Informative)

      by DrLudicrous (607375) on Monday September 08 2003, @02:41AM (#6897928) Homepage
      Yes and no. Most MRI systems for humans operate at about 1.5 Tesla. I know of at least one 8 Tesla system, but that is experimental. The higher the static field (i.e. the 25 Tesla), the better the resolution of your system can be.

      No one knows the effects of an 25 Tesla magnet on biological tissues. In addition, in order to get useable information out of an MRI system, one must hit it with radiofrequency (RF) waves. The higher the static field is, the higher these frequencies are going to be. A 7-tesla magnet uses frequences around 300 MHz. Therefore, by extrapolation (which I believe is right, since I know that a 9T system uses about 383 MHz), a 25 Hz system would need about 1.1 GHz. This might very well be extremely detrimental to biological tissue. In other words, to do MRI, you'd have to cook your sample.

      Finally, to truly achieve a resolution advantage, you will need very powerful gradients. The gradients one would need to take advantage of such a system would be gigantic, at least tens if not hundreds of Tesla per meter. This would be very difficult to design for samples as large as a human body, if not impossible with today's technology, and at the very least extremely expensive.

      Personally, I can see a 25 Tesla magnet being useful, just not for MRI. Perhaps for NMR being using not for imaging purposes, but in the study of non-soft condensed matter systems (i.e. not biological or organic, but solid state). It would be useful for examining superconductivity also.

        • Re:Congratulations (Score:5, Informative)

          by DrLudicrous (607375) on Monday September 08 2003, @02:54AM (#6897970) Homepage
          MRI is all about pulses my friend. Good point. The reason for the pulses is not to protect the tissues- basically it is a timing issue that allows for nuclear spins to reach certain alignments which are favorable to making measurements that can lead to making an image, hence magnetic (the field) resonance (nuclear spin resonance of the hydrogen [most common] atoms in your sample), imaging (after data analysis of RF signals, you get a pretty picture).

          BTW, at smaller scales, things work a bit differently- it is much easier to make powerful gradients over a small distance (say a few millimeters, or hundreds of microns) than it is over larger ones (say a human torso, or even a forearm). I wish I could be more specific about this, but my theory background on MRI is still a work in progress- I hope I didn't screw anything up in my post above. Any MRI geeks out there, feel free to correct or add anything I missed.

        • BTW, I did a bit of quick internet research. I would say that 1GHz would be OK for biological samples- it is on the low end of the 'microwaves' (energy in an RF wave linearly increases with the frequency). Still, this is the same principle that reheats your food in your kitchen nuker. There are already techniques using less magnetic field and higher RF pulses (these are different from MRI). Check out http://depts.washington.edu/ceeh/publication/News l etter/Newsletter9/fc6.htm for some info on Electron
    • yes this will also change the fridge magnet industry beyond recognition.

  • Football? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jonas the Bold (701271) on Monday September 08 2003, @02:29AM (#6897896)
    Now if only our football team was that cool Are you sure you're a geek?

  • Another railgun link (Score:3, Informative)

    by DarenN (411219) on Monday September 08 2003, @02:30AM (#6897899) Homepage
    is railgun.org [railgun.org]

    They have a detailed overview of the physics involved, too.

  • Is there any breakthrough here? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kmac06 (608921) on Monday September 08 2003, @02:31AM (#6897901)
    Neither article got into any detail, but I get the impression this is just a "bigger better" thing, not any particular breakthrough. Just put a few more coils and you get something stronger...no big surprise? Or is there something I'm not seeing here?

    • Re:Is there any breakthrough here? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by hbackert (45117) on Monday September 08 2003, @02:53AM (#6897965)

      It is a bit more tricky than just 'add more coils' or 'use more current'.

      Back at university we had a 14T He cooled magnet. Reaching 12T was standard. No issues. But having 2 more Teslas out of that thing took many tricks: pumping off the Helium to make it even colder, increasing current near the limit. The thick copper cables got pretty warm. And heat and superconducting coils and Helium don't mix well, so for us, 15T was unreachable.

      It's not unsimilar to the 10s/100m in athletics: Everyone get's close, but it took some time until someone finally was faster than 10s.

      20T was the limit for 'usual' magnets. Getting more needed a new trick. But I admit that for people not using this stuff, it looks very much like no particular breakthrough. Like I never cared if I can run 100m in 10.1 or 9.9s. It's just 2% difference after all, isn't it?

      • Ok, so you're pumping the electrical output of a medium sized hydroelectric plant through thick copper cables into freezing superconducting contacts. All is fine as your magnet draws millions of amps - for a while, until your copper wires start getting a little too hot. Soon you are using all your helium to cool them so that they don't heat up your superconducting contacts, but you are running out of helium! You want to shut off the power, but that can not be done with a switch because of the danger of a

  • The problem with railguns (Score:4, Interesting)

    by afidel (530433) on Monday September 08 2003, @02:33AM (#6897905)
    Is that no material can take the EM pulse AND the physical abrasion. I guess levitating the object and magnetically containing it during its travel might work but no one has done that so far AFAIK. Every rail gun experiment I have seen needs to replace the rails every couple of shots if they try very high pulse energies.

    • Re:The problem with railguns (Score:5, Informative)

      by imsabbel (611519) on Monday September 08 2003, @03:17AM (#6898034)
      The problem is that you cant levitate your object because you need it touching the rail to conduct the drive current.

      Thats the main problem. Else you could just throw a bagload of teflon on the slug and fire away.

      The main problem is not physical abrasion, but the fact that even if the projectile fits perfectly, the current density creates arc discharges between rail and slug, vaporizing the top layers

  • Railgun: Repeatable Access Denial System (Score:3, Funny)

    by dbIII (701233) on Monday September 08 2003, @02:38AM (#6897925)
    Metalstorm (www.metalstorm.com) is a company possibly within projectile distance of where I live that are working on railguns.

    Since they are working on a system called "Repeatable Access Denial System" they just have to be mentioned on slashdot!

  • Advanced Technology (Score:5, Funny)

    by soliaus (626912) on Monday September 08 2003, @02:56AM (#6897976) Homepage Journal
    The high tech lab offers researchers specialized equipment that is not available anywhere else in the country
    http://www.fsunews.com/vnews/display.v?TARGET=show Image&article_id=3f56a1ad62845&image_num=1 [fsunews.com]

    Thats one hell of a soldering iron.

  • Silly question from the ignorant (Score:5, Interesting)

    by questamor (653018) on Monday September 08 2003, @02:59AM (#6897986)
    Just curiously, if these fields are being generated as 500,000 times stronger than tha earth's own... are they detectable from space?

  • World record? Where? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by earthy (11491) on Monday September 08 2003, @03:06AM (#6898008)
    Now, I may be just stupid, but I'd say the people at the
    High Field Magnet Laboratory [sci.kun.nl] in Nijmegen have a much stronger claim
    to world records... (33T continuous, 60T pulsed).

    Where is the world record?
    • I think FSU are only claiming the record for a *superconducting* magnet, not for the highest continuous magnetic field generated using a hybrid magnet.

      So yes... relatively speaking, I'm not so sure the FSU's world record is so impressive. Guess this advance could lead to advances in hydrid magnets though...?

  • In Other News... (Score:5, Funny)

    by insane8 (563668) on Monday September 08 2003, @03:08AM (#6898013)
    None of my credit cards seem to be working anymore...
    • This is a constant worry/annoyance to those of us that work with high-field magnets. I never can tell if my credit card is not working because the machine is flaky, or because I forgot to take my wallet out before I started working around the magnet. And you can't remagnetize the cards, which means you have to go get all new stuff.

      On the bright side of things, this is a great way to circumvent those drivers license scanners bouncers use at bars to record who has stepped in to drink- a sign of Big Brothe

  • 31 T (or greater) Hybrid Magnets (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wakaranai (87059) on Monday September 08 2003, @03:11AM (#6898019)
    It's possible to go to generate higher continuous (i.e. as opposed to pulsed) magnetic fields, using hydrids of superconducting and electromagnets.

    I saw a hybrid magnet in the Insitutue of Materials Research (KINKEN) in Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan) with a maximum field of 31 T.
    http://www.imr.tohoku.ac.jp

    I got the impression that there are other devices (worldwide) with even higher continuous fields.
  • Why don't they just spike the football and turn this on at one end of the stadium?
  • You maybe some of you can think of something clever.

    He sounds like one of the Cosby kids: "You said for to not for to drink your dreeeenk!"

  • But did they check properly? (Score:3, Funny)

    by adeyadey (678765) on Monday September 08 2003, @04:37AM (#6898168) Journal
    By holding a piece of paper over it and sprinkling some iron filings?

  • Energy storage/regulation applications.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by adeyadey (678765) on Monday September 08 2003, @06:24AM (#6898400) Journal

    Perhaps, after the recent power outages in the US, the most important application of supercoducting magnets could be power storage. There seem to be 2 ways they are used - either to make friction-free magnetic bearings for traditional flywheel systems, or (more interesting) direct short-term storage of power. For situations where you need to temporarily store a *lot* of power this is an interesting technology alternative to batteries/hydro/etc.. Current devices seem to cover mainly very short term variations, but what about covering longer term regulation (hours/days) of variable power from a wind-farm, or solar, for example?

    Anyone got more gen on this?

    Try Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage (SMES) Systems [azom.com]

    This link [e-cavern.com] describes a commercial device that stores 3 megawatt-seconds..

  • Woah, back off with the big words! (Score:4, Funny)

    by DirkDaring (91233) on Monday September 08 2003, @08:02AM (#6898885)
    "FSU's High Magnetic Field Lab, more specifically my Kenpo teacher, just broke 7 world records, and brought the record for a superconducting magnet to 25 Tesla. Check it out at FSView and a more detailed article here. Now if only our football team was that cool."

    What makes you think people here know something about 'football'?

  • Magneto would be very proud. (Score:3)

    by truth_revealed (593493) on Monday September 08 2003, @09:02AM (#6899360)
    But their plot to take over the world will ultimately be foiled by Jean Luc Picard.... errr..., wrong show, but you get the idea.

    And another thing - where's the radiant electricity that they promised to beam from towers in 1900? Transmission lines and power cords - blech.

  • Some tidbits of info... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Jon Abbott (723) on Monday September 08 2003, @09:06AM (#6899402) Homepage
    As someone who works next door [yahoo.com] to the FSU Mag Lab, and has taken a tour of the facilities, I have heard a couple things about it that boggle the mind... First, if they didn't contain the magnetic field that they are producing, they claim that it would erase everyone's floppies, hard drives, and credit cards in the entire city of Tallahassee. Second, they consume one quarter of the entire power consumption of Tallahassee to create the fields they are creating. The city of Tallahassee had to install a power generation station nearby just to get power to them easily. They apparently ramp up the magnets while everyone else is sleeping, in order to prevent brownouts during the day.

    Out of curiosity, I just looked up their electric bill online [talgov.com], but it lumps the Mag Lab's usage with multiple other FSU buildings... The total bill was $500k this month, so it must be an amount less than that.

    • Re:25 Tesla (Score:5, Informative)

      by DrLudicrous (607375) on Monday September 08 2003, @02:49AM (#6897951) Homepage
      The charge is not static. It says "velocity of one meter per second". That means it's moving- if it wasn't moving, there would be no force on it, despite the magnetic field.

      One electron has a charge of 1.6E-19 Coloumbs, so you are talking about the equivalent of 6.7E18 electrons moving at 1m/s. One coulomb is the amount of charge that passes through a point in a wire in one second which is carrying one Amp of current.

      The instantaneous force being described would be perpendicular to both the motion of the particle and that of the magnetic field. Make a gun with your right hand, let your index finger point in the direction of the charge, let the field point in the direction of your thumb. Stick out your middle finger so it makes a right angle with both digits, and that is the direction of the force.

        • Re:25 Tesla (Score:5, Informative)

          by DrLudicrous (607375) on Monday September 08 2003, @03:40AM (#6898078) Homepage
          Well, that is a good try. The equation you have is one of the first taught in electroSTATICS. We are talking about electroDYNAMICS, ie moving charged particles, versus arrangements of particles that aren't moving.

          In that case, the equivalent of Coulomb's Law becomes

          F=q(E+v x B)

          Here, F is force, q is the charge that is moving, E is the electric field (if present, you may remember something like E=kq/|r|, which is basically the force law you listed divided by a charge, giving units of Newtons/Coulomb), v is the velocity of the moving particle. All quantities in bold refer to vectors, so they not only have magnitude, but direction. In the case of the weber definition above, there is no electric field, so that part has no contribution. We are then left with:

          F=q(v x B)

          Here, the x does not just mean normal scalar multiplication but vector multiplication. All this means is to take into account the angles between the directions of the velocity and the magnetic field. Either way, the force will be perpendicular to both, so if you can imagine drawing lines indicating the velocity and magnetic field lying in a plane, the force the particle experiences points straight out of that plane. The more in line the velocity and field are (i.e. the smaller the angle they make relative to one another in that plane) than the smaller the force will be. If the particle is moving in the direction that the magnetic field points in, then it will experience no force- again, this is a result of the vector multiplication (better known as the cross product, where A x B=|A||B|Cos[theta], where theta is the angle between A and B.

          Make sense? If you have questions, post them here.

    • Think of metal.
      You get a carrier density of 10^23 cm^3 with a charge of e =1.602*10^-19 each.
      so you have around 10000 coulomb per cm^3.

      Compared to capacitors, a coulomb is a lot, but in metallic conductors a lot of charge is moving, which results in very low carrier speeds (typically around 1cm/s under normal circumstances).

      But with those magnets, you have much higher current densitys and those forces become one of the main problems designing them. They are heavily reenforced with aluminium structures bec
    • question: Is that charge spoken of a static charge? If it is, how big is that charge compared to typical static charges?

      A coulomb is just a certain number of electrons [gsu.edu]. Magnetic forces act on any charged particle in motion, so the units for the strength of a magnetic field are the amount of force on a certain number of charged particles moving at a certain speed.

      How much is a coulomb? Besides saying that it's 16 billion billion (1.6e19) electrons, it's easier to think about what that amount of electrons

    • The health benefits of magnet therapy, useful in the treatment of everything from carpal tunnel syndrome to back pain, are well known.

      That is entirely true - those that sell the things to the credulous can afford a high standard of health care.

      If you are old enough to read this and comprehend words such as "carpal" you are most likely older than the whole magnetic scam - unless you include the last time this was done by discredited folks such as Mesmer well over a century back (yes - it was a joke then to

    • Yeah, my grandpa sleeps with a magnet-studded blanket under him. I'm gonna have to buy him one of these babies for Christmas.

      *click*
      *HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM*
      No more arthritis Grandpa?

    • Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)

      by DrLudicrous (607375) on Monday September 08 2003, @02:58AM (#6897983) Homepage
      The magentic field in these magnets is very localized. They have tiny "bores", i.e. the area inside the magnet where there is actually high field. The earth on the other hand, has a much larger volume of magnetic field, even though it is smaller in magntiude.

      So it is kind of a matter of concentration. Your keys aren't going to flying out of your pocket b/c these magnets get turned on, nor will they affect your compass because you are too far away from the space that they affect. The earth on the other hand will affect your compass, because you are in its (fields) area of affect.

    • And why would they want to suck all that stuff down to Australia?? ;-D
      • Oh, are you making an X-Men 2 reference? Don't forget, the iron had to be specially injected.
      • The iron in your blood is not ferrogmagnetic because it is part of a molecule- hemoglobin which is more or less not affected by magnetic fields.

        Now if you were to inject a bunch of fine iron fillings, you might have a case, but you would also be very dead before the blood ever got sucked out.

    • Perhaps if you were only in the business of scanning plastic containers for contraband...and sort of ferromagnetic material that you would "scan" using a magnet in the multi-tesla reigon would be subject to becoming deadly projectiles.
    • Hrrmmm.... =/

      First of all, you would have the slight problem of buildinga magnet with a bore large enough to fit a car through... Because the magnetic field strength is proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance, that would have to be a freakin powerfull magnet to fit a truck through.

      Assuming that you could build a magnet that large, one would then have a slight problem that any and all ferrous-metallic parts in the car or truck would be attracted to the magnet. Essentially, the ma
    • And, praytell, what do you think they use to pay for all of these academic endeavors?

      At FSU, Seminole Football pays the bills. This is the Magnet that Bobby Bowden built. Even if none of the revenue paid for this research directly, it paid for a lot of other programs that would have been competing for those dollars at budget time.

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