FSU Sets 7 World Records In High Magnetics Research

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.

Is there any breakthrough here?

[kmac06]

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?

The problem with railguns

[afidel]

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:Is there any breakthrough here?

[hbackert]

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?

Re:There are also potential medical benefits

[dbIII]

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 too and only belonged in horror novels).

Silly question from the ignorant

[questamor]

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?

[earthy]

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?

31 T (or greater) Hybrid Magnets

[wakaranai]

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.

Re:In Other News...

[DrLudicrous]

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 Brother if you ask me. I think I will erase my drivers license's striope tomorrow...

Energy storage/regulation applications..

[adeyadey]

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..

Explosions?

[A55M0NKEY]

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 arcing, the only way to disconnect the power is by letting the generators spin down. You call the power plant to tell them to spin down their genreators, but they laugh at you. The helium is gone. It is only a matter of time before the superconductors warm up. The magnet groans. You can not imagine why a superconducting magnet would make such a noise, but never the less, the magnet groans. All of a sudden the superconducting properties of the coils break down. You smell smoke.

You expect the arcing to be the familiar blue-violet glow, but instead, you see bright yellow arcing because of the residual helium, and some reds and greens from the vaporizing metals in the ceramic superconducting wire.

The heat of the electrical arc spreads the failure to the surrounding superconducting wire. It starts slowly, but the electrical fire seems to be spreading at an exponential rate. Through the thick pyrex view plate once so clear but now covered in places with an opaque layer of condensed metal smoke, and in others so foggy that all you can see is flashing yellow electrical arcs tinted in places with other colors, you see the immenent destruction of the whole lab. The heat will build pressure in the coil chamber the helium and vaporized metal plasma will weaken the three inch thick pyrex view plate, causing it to shatter. You run for it.

Outside you watch the side of the building for smoke, nothing, no sign of the disaster within. People rush out of the exits and gather next to the person - you - who was considerate enough to pull the fire alarm.

BANG!! The brick wall bursts, smoke, broken bricks, and glass, and a brief yellow flash. The glowing gas bubbles upward, ball shaped for an instant before disappearing.

You watch the smoke billow out of the building. The roof has not collapsed. You creep around a wide circle to see into the building you just destroyed. There is a loud buzz. You see a mean blue-violet-green stationary arc from the end of your 12 inch thick melting copper cable to the ground cable. Red hot copper has eaten it's way through the floor, and started a fire in the basement. Hopefully it doesn't fall on the huge tanks of fuel oil they use for heating.

BANG! They blow up. The fire pressurized the kerosene-like fuel in the tanks, causing them to explode. The normally benign hydrocarbon is atomized, hot volitile and well mixed with air. The entire building shatters spraying splintered, burning wood, and crumbled brick bits of wall for hundereds of feet in every direction. The billowing orange, no red, no black mushroom cloud rises into the sky, a beacon for the fire department to find. All eyes are on you. It was your lab that blew up. You melt backwards towards the parking lot and take off squealing your tires on the way to the newstand to look for another job..

Re:new MRI application?

[VoidEngineer]

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 magnet would probably pick the car up, off the ground; the car would fly towards the magnet at a very fast velocity; there would be a very large crash; and the car and magnet would become one big mess of magnetic metal.

unfortunately, the only feasible method of implementing this idea would be to have all-plastic cars. also, one would need to implement laws and legislation to prevent anybody with a pacemaker, aneurism clips, or heart pump from driving a car...

anyhow, to make a MRI car scanner, one would probably need to design a low-field magnet (so the cars don't get pulled towards it), and extremely sensitive radio transmitters / receivers. The trick to building an MRI car scanner would be in designing the radio transmit/recieve coils (which could possibly be built in a tunnel kind of way). If I were to try building this type of scanner (and I happen to work with a 1.5 Tesla MRI cryomagnet every day) I'd try putting a 0.5 tesla magnet *under* the road.

However, one would need damn good lawyers in the case that somebody with a pacemaker was riding in the car being scanned, and the car scanner turned off their pacemaker. The litigation would be a nightmare, I'm sure.... Also, one has to worry about FDA licensing, highway & transportation authorities, etc. etc.