Principle of Operation
Like any other electric motor, the homopolar motor is driven by the Lorentz force: as they move through an external magnetic field, the current carriers in the conductor experience a push that is perpendicular to both their velocity and to the external magnetic field. This force induces a torque around the axis of rotation. Because the axis of rotation is parallel to the external magnetic field, no commutation is required for the conductor to keep turning. This simplicity is achieved at the cost of not being able to have more than one coil turn, which makes the homopolar motor unsuited for most useful applications.
Like most electro-mechanical machines, a homopolar motor is reversible: if the conductor is turned mechanically, then it will operate as a homopolar generator, producing a direct current voltage between the two terminals of the conductor. The direct current produced is an effect of the homopolar nature of the design.
Read more about this topic: Homopolar Motor
Famous quotes containing the words principle of, principle and/or operation:
“I sincerely believe ... that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed. Except in the sacred tests of democracy and in the incantations of the orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)