Friday, November 6, 2015

Lab 10: Magnetism

Lab 10: Magnetism

In Lab 10 we experimented with magnetic fields, studying how they acted and where they were directed between a magnets north and South Pole. During this experiment we measured our first 3 dimensional object that was large enough to interact with, a Helmholtz coil.
   
We were tasked with measuring it’s magnetic field lines to find where they went and isolate its north and south poles. to do this we took a compass and a sheet of paper to track the needles direction and began moving the compass in differing areas of the coil, marking the needles facing on the sheet of paper every roughly 30 degrees. Doing this we noticed that the field seems to move as shown below.

This showed us the main movement and area of the coils magnetic fields, and how similar they could be. The coil has a single moving line going through its center as a result of the cancelling effects of the different fields on either side of the center, creating a uniform and regular magnetic field that can be easily modified.

Possible flaws
due to our only measuring every 30 degrees we could have possibility missed or failed to gain the fields size due to measurement or user error, additionally as we could not directly trace it very well on the sheet of paper we were unable to guarantee that it was correct, a better way to possibly perform this experiment in the future would be with metallic dust that we could track and monitor to see how it moved in relation with the magnetic fields, but that could end up being too much of a mess to clean up to be worth using.


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