Gravity

[Fitness]

Would creating a room with an electromagnetic floor, while wearing something with magnets laced throughout, from head to toe, have the same effect as increased gravity?
Unfamiliar with the mechanics of gravity, but simply wearing magnets wouldn't have the exact same effect would it? It would only drag you down from the outside of your body whereas gravity goes throughout, but would it achieve the same principle?
It would be like an amped version of resistance training, no?

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Fitness

Would creating a room with an electromagnetic floor, while wearing something with magnets laced throughout, from head to toe, have the same effect as increased gravity?

I think what you describe is possible., though it would need to be more complicated than simply a magnetized floor, and you wouldn’t need to wear lots of magnets, only lots of iron.

It’s possible to produce very high accelerations using magnetic fields and ordinary ferrous materials – for example, railguns, which produce accelerations on metal projectiles on the order of 100,000 times the acceleration of gravity. If one scaled such a device up to fit a human body, and reduced the acceleration to just a fraction of a few gs, you have your goal.

However, generating a magnetic field that’s fairly uniform throughout an exercise room size volume would be very complicated, and I suspect require a lot of electric power. Because human tissue doesn’t have much metal in it – and what it has, it’s unwise to tug at magnetically – such a system would require you to wear metal distributed over you body, with straps and pads to spread its force over good load-bearing parts of your anatomy - shoulders and hips, mainly. So it would feel much like simply wearing a lot of weights in a harness, and would have the same bruising and chafe problems.

Given all this, I think you’d get about the same effect at a lot less effort and cost just wearing a harness with lots of weights.

A better solution, I think, which wouldn’t require you to wear special rigs, would be a room-size centrifuge. Since most centrifuges have been used to train pilots and astronauts to tolerate high-g acceleration while seated, their size and arrangement have been limited to cockpit-size “rooms”, but in principle, they could be scaled up to exercise room size.

Another approach would be to use a large airplane, a sort of reverse of the “Vomit Comet” aircraft used for zero-g training, though you’d only get about 20 sec periods of increased gs, followed by longer periods waiting for plane set up to repeat its maneuver.

[Fitness]

Originally Posted by CraigD

such a system would require you to wear metal distributed over you body, with straps and pads to spread its force over good load-bearing parts of your anatomy - shoulders and hips, mainly. So it would feel much like simply wearing a lot of weights in a harness, and would have the same bruising and chafe problems.

Given all this, I think you’d get about the same effect at a lot less effort and cost just wearing a harness with lots of weights.

I figured wearing something close to that of Skins (Eg, images.sportsshoes.com/product/S/SKI5/SKI5_400_1.jpg), laced throughout with iron as you mentioned, would give an evenly distributed amount of weight throughout your entire body covered by said garment. Using an electromagnet beneath the floor, I'm assuming you could control just how strong you want the pull force to be, effectively making the garment heaver or lighter on demand.

[freeztar]

Originally Posted by Fitness

I figured wearing something close to that of Skins (Eg, images.sportsshoes.com/product/S/SKI5/SKI5_400_1.jpg), laced throughout with iron as you mentioned, would give an evenly distributed amount of weight throughout your entire body covered by said garment. Using an electromagnet beneath the floor, I'm assuming you could control just how strong you want the pull force to be, effectively making the garment heaver or lighter on demand.

It's important to note that the iron located near the feet would be much more heavily influenced by the "electromagnet beneath the floor" than more superior areas, such as the head, neck, and shoulders. If one laid (back down) on a magnetic floor with an iron suit, the magnetic force across the whole body would be much more sufficient, but a comparison of the difference in magnetic "pull" from the chest compared to the back would show that the iron on the back is affected more by the magnet. In other words, magnetic fields are a distance-limited phenomenon. In mathematical terms, one would use a Tesla as a unit of measurement for this effect.

I agree with CraigD that it would be extremely difficult and costly to create an isotropic magnetic field. I also agree that it would be much better to just work out in an iron suit.

[Fitness]

Thanks for the help guys.

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Fitness

I figured wearing something close to that of Skins (Eg, images.sportsshoes.com/product/S/SKI5/SKI5_400_1.jpg), laced throughout with iron as you mentioned, would give an evenly distributed amount of weight throughout your entire body covered by said garment.

If you think about this for a bit – or try a little experiment with the help of friends and/or lots of thread – I think you’ll see the problem with this.

The magnetic artificial gravity will be pulling the fabric of the skinsuit. Imagine tacking (sewing a small loop of thread through the fabric) lots of threads evenly over a skinsuit, passing them though holes in the floor, and attaching them to weights totaling the weight you want to increase by (eg: if you want to train in 2 gs, equal to your weight). What will happen?

I think you’d find that, as far as it can, the suit will stretch, “puddling” around your waist, wrists, and ankles (if the neck is stretchy enough, it will just pull off over your shoulders and slip down to lie on the floor around your feet). When it stops stretching (which, if you intentionally used very inelastic fabric, say something with long nylon or carbon fibers in it), you’ll be feeling nearly all of the downward force where the fabric crosses you shoulders.

You could try to overcome this by effectively gluing (ouch!) the suit to your skin like a second skin, but this would just transfer the effect to your skin. Worst case, the skin of you shoulders splits, and you literally get skinned in something reminiscent of the ”Hellraiser” movies, less bad, it would feel like the moment during a full-body wax hair removal treatment between when the pull starts, and the wax pulls free with your body hairs stuck in it.

The basic physics problem here is that the force of gravity affects all of the mass in you body equally, and most of your mass is inside you, not concentrated on the surface. Any sort of system where the force-generating rig is worn outside of you is an attempt to simulate gravity using just this surface layer, and is doomed to fail.

What you’re left with is the possibility of somehow lacing your entire body with something magnetic, such as tiny iron particles in your blood that lodge in all you tissues, but this sounds like trouble to me.

Better, I think, to simulate the acceleration of gravity via an acceleration that acts almost exactly like gravity, centrifugal force. All you need is a room suspended from arms or cables that allow it to be spun around like a bucket on a rope – a significant bit of mechanical engineering, but nothing that’s not already been done on a smaller scale with aerospace g-force trainers. With such a system, you’d be able to “dial in” whatever rotation speed you wanted, up to the limits of the machine. I’d estimate the power requirements of such a machine to be about that of a large truck at highway speeds, the space requirements, a large warehouse/hanger. Several people could use it at the same time.

With such a system, I believe you’d be able create either people with super-strength, or people with the worst chronic hamstring injuries in the history of sports training (ouch!). The success and popularity of such a system obviously depends on which of these outcomes you get.

[modest]

I agree with Craig—a centrifuge is the way to go.

But, I also would wonder if there is a way to accomplish this in the parameters of the opening post and without wearing any metal or magnets.

Water and carbon and the biological things they make up are diamagnetic which means they are repulsed by a magnetic field. The effect is extraordinarily weak, but it has been used to levitate a frog (and lizard and some other little things). The field strength was reportedly 16 Tesslas. So.. I imagine it would be possible to put a gigantic magnet in the ceiling of a room and force a person to the floor simulating > 1 g. There would probably be health concerns... especially if the person had anything ferromagnetic on them like metal fillings or a tattoo—there would be immediate too-graphic-for-TV-type health concerns

Diamagnetism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

~modest

[Pyrotex]

Originally Posted by modest

I agree with Craig—a centrifuge is the way to go....

You guys are right. Go with a centrifuge. But forget the NASA / test-pilot style of centrifuge. Think carnival ride!!

Many carnivals ("fairs", "circuses") have rides that are basically centrifuges. One is a circular floor with a high wall, making a circular "room". You stand at the edge with your back to the wall. The room spins faster, until everyone is "pinned" to the wall. Sometimes they drop the floor at this point to make the ride scarier.

Consider a variation: the wall starts out flat, co-planar with the floor. You stand on the wall. As the floor starts spinning, the wall is slowly tilted inward at just the right amount so that if you're standing correctly, the horizontal component of the centrifugal force (outward) is just enough to balance the tilted-gravity force (inward). The remaining component of the centrifugal force will pull you toward your feet.

If the room spins fast enough so that the wall tilts upward at 30 degrees -- and you can stand "straight up" on the wall (your body is perpendicular to the wall and tilts inward at 30 degrees to the floor), you should be experiencing around 2 G's.

[GAHD]

Weight training in an environment that messes up your inner ear with Coriolis forces and precession while effectively doubling the loads on your flesh...sounds fun.

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by GAHD

Weight training in an environment that messes up your inner ear with Coriolis forces and precession while effectively doubling the loads on your flesh...sounds fun.

Have you no sense of adventure?!

(Note that this is coming from someone who’s idea of a fun night at Caesars Palace was to ride their vaguely out-of-focus “3-D motion ride” non-stop for a couple of hours, struggling after the first half hour or so to keep the contents of his stomach in his stomach. Some of us have never quite gotten over childhood dreams of training to be an astronaut)

Originally Posted by Pyrotex

You guys are right. Go with a centrifuge. But forget the NASA / test-pilot style of centrifuge. Think carnival ride!!

I agree. Carnival ride tech is more accessible than aerospace – a cunning shopper can buy a ride pretty cheap, a good starting place for a “2 g training room” prototype.

Many carnivals ("fairs", "circuses") have rides that are basically centrifuges. One is a circular floor with a high wall, making a circular "room". You stand at the edge with your back to the wall. The room spins faster, until everyone is "pinned" to the wall. Sometimes they drop the floor at this point to make the ride scarier.

This would be, I think, a “Round Up”, known by various other names, such as “Zero Gravity”, “Meteor”, and (from my own short carny career) “Cloud 9”.

Consider a variation: the wall starts out flat, co-planar with the floor. You stand on the wall. As the floor starts spinning, the wall is slowly tilted inward at just the right amount so that if you're standing correctly, the horizontal component of the centrifugal force (outward) is just enough to balance the tilted-gravity force (inward).

Sounds workable, with some hydraulics to handle the tilting.

I think having the whole room in an windowless, fairly soundproof box is a design necessity, not only for safety, but to pull off the psychological illusion of being in stronger than Earth-normal gravity, rather than being in a rushing box.

To avoid the nausea-inducing effect GAHD mentions, you’d also want the turntable to have as large a radius as possible, trading off against the higher speed required (, so each doubling of radius requires the room’s speed to be increased by about a factor of 1.4) – unless you put this thing in a partial vacuum, it’ll need to be kept well-subsonic.

Thrown stuff from or at spinning rides is always an injury concern. Though I never saw any blood-drawing or worse injury, the Cloud 9 or my experience was notorious for spraying crowds with hapless riders’ coins and others pocket contents, which caused the occasional “that could have put out an eye” outcry from worry-prone marks customers. Spitting was another problem rider behavior, though since it usually wound up back in the spitter’s face, was more funny than serious.

A turntable isn’t a necessary feature of a design. One could, for example, build a circular track along the lines of a steel roller-coaster, though it would take a lot of steel and concrete, need some sort of drive motor for the car, and, I think, be vibration-prone.

My present favorite idea for a machine that could be built on a reasonable budget is a variation on another carnival ride, the “swing carousel”, AKA “Wave Swinger”, “Flying Carousel”, “Chair-O-Planes”, etc. Reinforced and with the individual swing seats replaced with a couple of sturdy, streamlined boxes hung on opposite sides of the ride, I think this design, would work for a 2 g training room.

A design advantage of hanging the room rather than tilting it via hinges and actuators is that the floor is automatically always apparently horizontal. All the design needs is a motor and a motor speed controller, both of which can be fixed.