How do Electric Motors Work?
Do you know that there are electric motors everywhere? They are in the house, in the car, in the garden mower, in the washing machine, in the cake mixer, food processor, microwave; the list just goes on and on. But have you ever wondered how it works or have you just taken its presence for granted knowing it is there and yet dismissing it as part of everyday life?
The fact is, you don't know how it works because you have taken its presence for granted so if your child of 5 asks you how it works, you wouldn't know what to answer. Here are a few basics so at least you won't get embarrassed in front of your five year old kid.
An electric motor is simply about magnets and magnetism. The motor utilizes the magnets for the purpose of creating motion.
Take for example a simple toy magnet. There are two opposites which can attract and repel. So if there is one end which is labelled 'north' and the other 'south,' then the north will attract the south. The north end will repel another north end, and the south end will also repel the other south end. This is exactly the same principle inside the motor. There are continuous attraction and repelling forces which will create a rotation motion.
The rotor of an electric motor is an electromagnet. It is made of copper wound in a circle around a soft iron core. The magnetic field is a permanent magnet but there are two semi-circular magnets that are fitted inside the casing of steel.
Larger motors and generators' electromagnets are also the field magnets which are today being used in cars.
Small electric motors
Inside a small electric motor are two small permanent magnets inside of a casing, two brushes which are housed and a winding wire around metal laminations or shafts with winding wire wound on them, this is known as the armature or the rotor.
There are three poles to the rotor which causes it to move better. If there are two poles the electromagnet is the balancing point and between the two poles is a field magnet. For three poles the motor can start turning from any point.
Now, each time the commutator (a switch that will reverse the direction of the current between the rotor and the external circuit) changes the direction of the field in a two-pole type motor, it will short out the battery for a little bit. This will waste the battery and drain it of its power. The three poles will fix this problem for it will only shift the direction when the repulsion is at its strongest point.
Now, there are motors with varying number of poles but this really depends on the size of the motor and how it is being used. There are some which use very rare but powerful magnets which can boost the power a lot; however, this makes the motor very expensive.
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How do I know when the magnets in my electric trailer brakes are worn out?
My Dexter electric trailer brakes on my travel trailer are size 10″ x 1 1/2″.
Electric current causes a magnet to contact the inside of the brake drum to engage a lever that pushes the brake shoes against the drum to slow down the trailer. Can the contact surfaces of both the magnet and the brake drum be machined flat to achieve a better contact area? How much of the metal surface of the magnet can be removed before it becomes useless?
can electric magnets be rigged with an alternator to be repelled in a circular motion to produce mechanical?
can electric magnets be rigged with an alternator to be repelled in a circular motion to produce mechanical energy and convert it to electricity to power a veichle. if possible wouldn’t they be able to do reverese osmosis with that energy?
How do you build an electric motor without using permanent magnets?
I need to build an electric motor without any permanent magnets with a power source no greater than 9V any help including diagrams would be greatly appreciated. Thankyou
I want to make an electric generator with some magnets and copper wire.?
I am making a windmill for my science project, and i need an electric generator. I can buy a used one online but i am afraid it might not work properly. I have seen people make generators with magnets and copper wire but i don’t know how to make it.
You don’t ever machine the magnets. Occasionally the drums will need to be turned to remove grooving that occurs naturally from break wear. The magnets or more correctly the brake actuators are replaced as a set. There are however a few checks that you need to do first. First question is, Do you have Surge brakes or a truck mounted controller? If you have surge brakes there should be an LED on the top when you plug it in to your vehicle it should come on to tell you if the brakes are working or not. If you have a truck mounted brake controller, you should also have an indicator light on the front of the module. With the truck mounted controller you have the added option of a brake lever.(A spring loaded slide switch on the front of the unit and an adjustment wheel usually located on the side of the unit. Set the adjustment wheel to maximum setting after hooking the trailer up. Pull forward slowly and pull the slide lever to manually activate the brakes. If your trailer wheels lock and drag then the brakes are working properly. reset them back to there normal setting where you can just feel a little pull on the trailer when you engage the manual slider. The magnets as a rule almost never wear out. Usually the drums or the pads or the mechanical parts fail long before the magnets will ever fail to work. More than likely you have a broken wire or your controller has failed for some reason. Surge brakes are prone to controller failure and a truck mounted unit is easier to check for failure than a surge type. Personally I prefer the truck mounted unit as it is more adaptable to different loads and can be manually adjusted for heavier loads. As to the magnets, I have never had a failure and i have used and worked on hundreds of these types of brakes. You might have some corrosion around the solenoid where the piston moves in and out of the magnets which will stop it from working. My main advise is if you do not have experience with this type of brake system then take it to a professional. You need both mechanical and electrical experience to work on these systems beyond the basic checks I have described above.
http://www.peswiki.com Guys like you are talking AND doing things like this and more.
To be an electric motor, you must have magnets pushing against each other. If you don’t want to use permanent magnets then you need to use electro magnets. This is a very common kind of motor and is called a universal motor. It can be wired as series or parallel – this describes how the electro magnets on the stator (the ones that dont move) and the communatator (the ones that do move) are wired together.
A squirrel cage motor has no permanent magnets but a field is induced in the squirrel cage (hence its also called an induction motor) by the stator windings. This creates a magnetic field to push against i.e. bocomes an electromagnet.
You can build a very simple motor using a compass (ok that is a permanent magnet) and winding some coils of wire around the casing and then connecting it to an ac field. This has only 1 moving part – the compass
how to make an electric motor without permanent magnets?
I have to make an electric motor for physics class, but it cannot be a beakman motor and it cannot have permanent magnets. He said instead of permanent magnets we could “simply” wrap field coil or something around a metal rod or nail.
Could anyone PLEASE explain how to do this, or send me a link of an example. thanks.
here ya go:
http://bizarrelabs.com/motor2.htm