The man at the carnival held out a minuscule coin.
"What I've got here," he said, "is the product of magic... dangerous and bright magic at that."
We peered at the coin and then raised an eyebrow.
"Actually, it looks like the product of electromagnetic forming."
What could the man say after that? Not much really, so we went on to explain the process just as we'll explain it to you.
When you were a wee geek, you probably took a coil of wire and wrapped it around a nail. You hooked up each end of the wire to a little 9v battery and then using the resulting electromagnet to pick up paper clips. Well, electromagnetic forming is the same basic concept except blown up to Tesla-like proportions (well, more of a byproduct of Faraday to be precise).
In a nutshell, electromagnetic forming is the result of cranking some scary high energy through a coil wrapped around a conductor. The coil gains a wicked magnetic field that's changing quite rapidly and imparts a magnetic field to the conductor via the "magic" of electromagnetic induction. The thing is that these two magnetic fields repel each other in a very violent way. If the power is sufficient and the experiment controlled, the coil explodes and the metal in the conductor is compressed.
This all happens in less than 1/100th of a second. A dangerous and bright magic indeed!
Product Specifications
•Real quarters zapped by 6,000 volts at 100,000 amperes
•The process takes less than 1/100th of a second
•Size: About diameter of a dime but twice as thick
•Yes, it's totally legal. Destroying money is only a crime if done with fraudulent
intent. This is just fun science.
No comments:
Post a Comment