Rare Earth Magnets for Electricity generation

I was thinking that Rare Earth Magnets could be used for electricity generation at anyone's home. I propose not a perpetual motion machine but a double-bladed windmill type machine with opposing magnet forces on each opposing windmill blade that has a generator in the middle where its rotor spins. The magnet power would weaken over time but switching to such a system and an electricity-based economy is great for the environment and the world's political economy. Any thoughts?

http://www.fieldlines.com

These guys have been there and done that.

A permanent magnet's not going to weaken over time, but the other components will wear out.

Neodymium Iron Boron is a good strong rare-earth magnet, popular, and not too expensive compared to, strontium, which I haven't looked up recently but I vaguely recall is much more expensive.

I hope yours ends up better than this one in the Big Island in Hawaii.

I am almost certain that magnetism is a force that can be harnessed for electricity generation. And that an economy based on electricity(i.e. electric cars, businesses, etc) is the only way to a sustainable, balanced, peaceful, and clean world. I think oil is a backwards old-school way and is causing major instability in what's supposed to be a more peaceful world. Oil has its place but not to cause so much strife from. Coal and nuclear too can be done away with mostly with my magnetism-produced electricity idea. I am for solar and wind but neither are creating a big and quick enough breakthrough to change the world now for the better, new-school, paradigm-changing way.

Looks like Tesla might have worked on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla#Hungary_and_France

Electricity and Magnetism are related in amazing ways:

http://www.wondermagnet.com/magfaq.html#q12


With this thesis that cleanly and easily-produced electricity is the building block to start from for a saner world, we just now need to harness all the brainpower and goodwill of all the geniuses and others out there to make this magic happen. And of course the mother-internet can assist in this project. It can be an open-source electricity production project. The greatest open source project of all time.

Oh. Electricity and magnetism are indeed related and a moving magnetic field induces an electric current. That's what causes the electricity generation in the power-converting windmills. (The ones that of course aren't rusted & broken.)

You can use the magnets to generate electricity at your home in the same way if you build a windmill or use some other natural force where you're converting existing kinetic energy (something's moving, such as air or water) into electrical energy. When you do the conversion there will of course be losses (laws of thermodynamics describe this) but the conversion can not only be done it's being actively used in many places.

For generating electricity, we've used:
- Wind to power a wind turbine
- Water dropping from one height to a lower height, usually in an engineered dam such as Hoover dam or whatever name you want to call it.
- steam such as in a nuclear power plant where a controlled nuclear reaction is used to heat up water to create steam. The water's run over the hot stuff to create steam. The steam turns a turbine.
- Natural gas or diesel. Example: When a locomotive runs by it's usually diesel. That diesel engine is only used to generate electricity to run the electric motors at the wheels. Example 2: The electricity you're using in NC is probably coming from natural gas burning and used to generate steam which in turn is used to generate electricity.

Did I understand your post correctly? I hope I did. Please let me know.

binky said:

Oh. Electricity and magnetism are indeed related and a moving magnetic field induces an electric current. That's what causes the electricity generation in the power-converting windmills. (The ones that of course aren't rusted & broken.)

You can use the magnets to generate electricity at your home in the same way if you build a windmill or use some other natural force where you're converting existing kinetic energy (something's moving, such as air or water) into electrical energy. When you do the conversion there will of course be losses (laws of thermodynamics describe this) but the conversion can not only be done it's being actively used in many places.

For generating electricity, we've used:
- Wind to power a wind turbine
- Water dropping from one height to a lower height, usually in an engineered dam such as Hoover dam or whatever name you want to call it.
- steam such as in a nuclear power plant where a controlled nuclear reaction is used to heat up water to create steam. The water's run over the hot stuff to create steam. The steam turns a turbine.
- Natural gas or diesel. Example: When a locomotive runs by it's usually diesel. That diesel engine is only used to generate electricity to run the electric motors at the wheels. Example 2: The electricity you're using in NC is probably coming from natural gas burning and used to generate steam which in turn is used to generate electricity.

Did I understand your post correctly? I hope I did. Please let me know.

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I know most of this but I was thinking that if you attach magnets to 2 windmill blades facing each other, with same magnetic poles facing outward, and then move them near each other, the blade ought to then move and can turn an electricity generating motor. Then keep them fixed in place close together and it will spin continuously. Imaging a fan with flat round magnets strongly glued to the fan blades. Take two fans like this and face them towards each other and they ought to spin on magnetic force alone.

To simplify what I'm saying: take two magnets and if you face them one way they attract and the other they repel each. The closer you push them the stronger the force. So use this repelling force(or maybe the attraction force) to move windmill blades. Just position them in such a way that their repelling force will move the blades continuously. The closer the blades are the faster they will spin thus making electricity faster. If this works I hereby copyright it for use as an open source project for all the world to use in electricity harvesting.

In general, yes wind powered electricity can work, if you're in a place where there's a lot of consistent wind. For your specific approach, it's not quite clear what you intend. Magnets fixed to a spinning shaft do indeed create electricity when surrounded by properly configured windings of wire. That is what a generator is.

If a generator is already attached to the windmill shaft, then adding more magnets to the rotating portion in any fixed arrangement will not improve anything, except in the very degenerate situation where the provided generator uses rotating magnets, the provided magnets are inadequate for the task, and the magnets you add happen to fill the shortfall in the generator's rotating field.

Somehow, I don't think that's what you mean, though.

Ah. Okay. I think I'm understanding better now. Sorry to have hit you with what you already know. Your motivation is a noble one, but you just can't get around the physics/thermodynamics that won't let your idea generate energy from a source not being depleted.

Let's say you aimed the magnetic pole of one magnet directly outward from each fan blade, meaning parallel to the axis of rotation around the axle that the blades are attached to. When you start, let's say you use your muscle power to start with the magnets almost directly across from each other so that their poles are strongly pushing. When you let go of the fan blades the magnets would push away from each other and cause the fan blades to rotate. This is because you've started the system with some potential energy that you gave it by positioning it yourself, by the way.

As the magnets rotated away from each other and the field decreased, let's say there was enough speed for it to go around enough to then reach near another magnet. The next magnetic field would repel the one coming around, right? So the device would slow down, then likely oscillate back toward the starting position.

Let's say you tried to "aim" the magnets to get them to turn the blades. So their fields are no longer parallel with the axis of the axle but are instead sorta skew to that, sort of as it might be if you had glued a fridge magnet to each of the fan blades.

In that case I think it's easiest to approach the solution by trying to imagine the full magnet field for each magnet, emanating from both ends of the magnet. You might at first think "well, at first the poles are repelling each other like they were before and there's also some of the other side being attracted toward the next pole, so it's even better this way." I'd understand that motivation too. Think of what happens as the fan blade rotates toward the next magnet though. The back of one magnet and the back other one approaching will repel each other. Even if you get get the fan blade to go far enough then the fronts would repel each other but the direction that their curvy fields hit each other wouldn't end up with a force vector that points in a positive direction.

It's pretty hard for me to do verbally, but don't take my word for it! I encourage you to try building one of these if you're really interested in it and see for yourself what happens.

I think that Magnets hold great promise for lots of environmental projects. I was involved in a project where High powered magnets were used to treat the water used in a Sugar Mill evaporator. The end result was the Mill cut it's descaling chemical in thier evaporators by more than half on a weekly basis. I was a skeptic but saw the results with my own two eyes.

All good electric motors and generators use rare-earth magnets nowadays. (also, they're not really rare-earth metals, we just didn't know where to find them in large deposits until recently.) Home-use windmill generators are already optimized as much as they can be. You can reinvent the wheel (or the windmill) if you want, but you won't be able to produce a better product than the companies that build windmill generators.

chanamasala said:

To simplify what I'm saying: take two magnets and if you face them one way they attract and the other they repel each. The closer you push them the stronger the force. So use this repelling force(or maybe the attraction force) to move windmill blades. Just position them in such a way that their repelling force will move the blades continuously. The closer the blades are the faster they will spin thus making electricity faster. If this works I hereby copyright it for use as an open source project for all the world to use in electricity harvesting.

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you'll have a hard time copyrighting this.... although a copyright is only for artistic works. I think you are looking for the word "patent".
The idea of using magnets to attract and repel each other has already been done. Do a search for the phrase "magnetic motor". Then do a search and see how many of them are in production and producing energy. That'll give you a hint as to how well the idea works.

However, there's no harm in building up your idea and seeing if it works and what the problems might be.

fyrstormer said:

All good electric motors and generators use rare-earth magnets nowadays. (also, they're not really rare-earth metals, we just didn't know where to find them in large deposits until recently.) Home-use windmill generators are already optimized as much as they can be. You can reinvent the wheel (or the windmill) if you want, but you won't be able to produce a better product than the companies that build windmill generators.

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dang it... I just looked at the dates of the earlier posts.. why bother to reply to a post that is over 6 years old?

Steve K said:

dang it... I just looked at the dates of the earlier posts.. why bother to reply to a post that is over 6 years old?

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Perhaps just for fun, to see if anyone will do likewise without checking the dates. :devil:

~ Chance

That's a very good question. For some reason I didn't see that it was 6 years old. I guess Cafe threads don't fall off the first page very fast.

fyrstormer said:

That's a very good question. For some reason I didn't see that it was 6 years old. I guess Cafe threads don't fall off the first page very fast.

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yeah... it must have been the magnets making it stick.