Motor Blog

Yesterday in class, we each learned how to create a working motor. We constructed the motor out of a battery, two paperclips, a coil of wire with the edges of the wire scraped off on the sides vertical to the battery and magnet. The reason that I did this was so that the wire loop could feel the torque caused by the magnetic field when current was running through it, and this occurred when only one side was scraped. I also learned that a current carrying wire feels a force in a magnetic field, and that contributes to the rotation of the coil in our project. The battery helped the motor by providing the flow of current into the paperclips, which acted as conductors. Then the coil of wire allowed the current to flow through the wire so that the force of the magnetic field was felt.  Finally, the magnet supplied the magnetic field so that the wire loop of coil would feel a torque when the current would flow through it, and turn. The rotation of the motor could be used to turn fan blades, blenders, car wheels, or really anything that rotates!

Click here to see my motor in action!