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Horizontally levitated pulse motor

The motor was running in this picture. Therefore the armature appears blurry.

The motor was located indoors on a cloudy day running on a small garden LED solar panel.

Vertically suspended low voltage pulse motor

Vertically suspended Mendocino motor

Introduction:

While many of us have played with a magnet as kids (young and old) we most likely never could find much to really do with them.

We immediately noticed that if you have two magnets things got more interesting. Attraction and repulsion of the like poles of the magnets being most noticeable. But we usually still didn't figure out a use for that feature. Moving one magnet with the other one from under the kitchen table was fun though. Or having one magnet attract another magnet or paper clips through your hand was amazing.

There are many enthusiasts building small magnetically levitated motors. Having something levitated in the air with no visible means of support almost seems magical and certainly gives kids and adults something to think about. You can find many videos of these motors on youtube. I am presenting three different types of motors I've built using magnets in one form or another. The articles on each motor will give you the basic information to build one for yourself.

Description of each motor:

The motor on the left is a magnetically levitated horizontal motor. This class of motors are known as "Mendocino motors" named after the area the person who presented them on the web live at. These motors typically use a pulsed multi-turn coil to magnetically repulse pole magnets mounted on the rotor as they pass by the coil. Different methods are used to electrically time the pulsing of the coils. This motor uses a transistor coil driver with the armature magnets supplying the timing pulse. The lowest voltage my motor runs on is ~0.6 Vdc. These motors are typically not self starting.

Some people claim these motors can run in "overunity" mode by using the BEMF pulse to generate a higher voltage than the input voltage. Overunity is another name for perpetual motion and they don't seem to understand or want to accept the fact that you can't just rename a known technical term to suit a different purpose. My article on this motor explains why with data to back up my claim that they are NOT an overunity motor as the term is defined.

The middle motor is a vertically suspended pulse motor. It uses stationary coils to apply a repulsive magnetic pulse to the rotating armature magnets. In affect it works the same as the horizontally pulsed motor except for the suspension system and how I pulse the coils. A reed switch is used to time the motor. I designed this motor to run on extremely low voltage. The motor will run on 0.0094 Vdc at an average input of 0.28 milliamp. That is an input power of 2.7 micro watts (0.000,002,7 watts) !!

The motor on the right is my version of a Mendocino motor. My motor is different because it is vertically suspended instead of being horizontal and is not magnetically levitated. Mendocino motors typically use four rotating solar cells with two coils, all mounted on the armature which is caused to rotate in a stationary magnetic field produced by a permanent magnet. The solar cells themselves do the timing of the current flow through the coils.

While these motors are unique, they do operate on well founded electrical principles and are a great teaching tool for magnetic theory etc.