Quote:
Originally posted by: nemo
As a crude example, if you were to place a number of electromagnets in a circle, then place a wheel with magnets attached to it inside the circle, would you be able to rotate the wheel simply by providing current to the electromagnets in sequential order?
I may be completely off base on this, but my rather juvenile powers of deduction are telling me that you might be able to dramatically increase the milage an automobile can achieve by lining your wheelwells and hubs with electromagnets and corresponding magnets. I couldn't give you a joule ratio for the potential delta in efficiency (sorry, not an EE) but it seems pretty straightforward to me.
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I think you have just decribed an electric motor. My thought was similar, but with "permanent" magnets. I know this has been tried numerous times in the past, but powered flight didn't go so well the first few times around either. I think I could get something to spin without any external power scource for the life of the magnets, which is quite long. It has been pointed out that there are no actual permanent magnets, a bit of a misnomer there. Using the attraction and repulsion properties of like and unlike poles, timed just so, this seems feasible to me. Now all I need to do is find the time to actually give it a "whirl".
