| Issue |
Emergent Scientist
Volume 1, 2017
International Physicists' Tournament 2016
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 4 | |
| Number of page(s) | 8 | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/emsci/2017004 | |
| Published online | 01 September 2017 | |
Research Article
Testing a simple model for the magnetic cannon
University of Crete, Physics Department,
Heraklion, Greece
* e-mail: ph4147@edu.physics.uoc.gr
Received:
19
December
2016
Accepted:
11
July
2017
A magnetic cannon consists of a line of steel balls which are in contact with a permanent magnet. If another steel ball collides with the system on one side, then the ball at the other end of the line is ejected at high speed. A theoretical model is proposed for the system by neglecting energy losses and making the approximation that the magnetic field is uniform near each ball. Our model can account for any magnet shape and is able to accurately predict the most efficient system configuration, as verified by experiments. Additionally, the predicted values of the ejection velocity are in most cases found to be in reasonable agreement with the experiment.
Key words: Gauss rifle / Gaussian accelerator / magnetism / energy conservation / measurement of velocity
© G. Magkos et al., Published by EDP Sciences, 2017
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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