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World's First Practical Plastic Magnet
Stopmotioncleaverman writes "New Scientist is reporting that scientists at the University of Durham in the UK have created the world's first plastic magnet to work at room temperature from two compounds, emeraldine base polyaniline (PANi) and tetracyanoquinodimethane (TCNQ). In 2001, scientists in Nebraska created a plastic magnet, but it only worked at 10 Kelvin.
Most notably from the article - "One of the most likely applications is in the magnetic coating of computer hard discs, which could lead to a new generation of high-capacity discs".
This story is also being reported in lots of other places."
I might be wrong though, I'm not a rocket scientist (or polymer scientist if you want)
IANAAP, but I believe electrostatic speakers covers that aspect pretty well already. There, the entire surface of the membrane is moving in concert as well.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I don't really see how this plastic could ever really help make a better speaker, but knowing how many useless superstitious expensive bullshit many audiophiles will buy (i.e. cable that costs $300 per meter), I'm sure if you made such a product you'd have no trouble selling it.
Have you ever even seen a real nurse?
At this point, the field strength of these magnets does not even come close to the current magnetic/ceramic magents we have, so its uses would be extremely limited.
In the article, they say that they were ready to throw the batch away, but they had aquired magnetic properties over 3 months in storage.
Whilst we must obviously wait and see, it doesnt look likely at this point.
liqbase
individual magnetic domains are macroscopic, on the order of mm or tenths of mm. dust is too small, you'd lose magnetic-ness.
Please RTFS ( read the fine synopsis) before posting. Scientists in Nebraska made the 10 Kelvin plastic magnet 3 years ago. The one from Durham works at room temp.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Sorry to disappoint you but the idea isn't as stupid as it looks :)
Electric motor needs magnets on both sides, both stator and motor. Only one needs to create variable field. You can perfectly well make the stator or rotor with normal magnets, frequently done with small motors too. The problem is any larger magnets are damn heavy compared to their strength, so usually in stronger/bigger motors electromagnets are used instead. Now if the plastic magnet was light enough and strong enough, it could perfectly well replace half of the coils present in the motor. The other half would have to remain there to create the changing field.
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For those like me that aren't inimately familliar with the kelvin scale of temperature measurement...
10 Kelvin = -263.15 degrees Celsius
According to Google.
My understanding of speaker technology is that at it's most basic, a cone is held attached in some way to a magnet, which is moved by modulating the intensity of an opposing magnetic field. The movement of the cone produces sound.
You suppose you could create some sort of sound that way, given enough power, but generally you let the magnet remain stationary and attach the much lighter copper windings that produce the oscillating field to the cone.
If the new material is insanely much more
magnetic than current permanent magnets I guess
you could turn it around. But the magnetinc film on the cone would have to be lighter than the current copper windings and still exert a magnetic field on the scale of big-ass ferrous magnets. Doens't sound extremely likely to me.
sudo ergo sum
Years back I read an article about a flame loudspeaker. The flame is pretty well ionized to begin with, so add an electrode at the bottom and top to inject the audio voltage. The envelope of the flame is modulated and it produces sound. Now that I think of it, the raw ionization of the flame was a bit weak, so they seeded some sodium (I forget if it was sodium glass or a wick into salt water.) into the bottom and got much better volume out.
About as close to zero mass as you can get. By no means stiff at all, but equally driven over its entire surface, so stiffness isn't important in this case.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Shame as they were good reference speakers
:)
"reference speakers" being an audio engineering euphamism for "really shitty sounding speakers to make sure that the mix still sounds ok on people's really shitty sounding speakers"
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
I remember not so long ago a news about some researchers that managed to create a conductive plastic; it was a remarkably better conductor than cooper.
References, please.
I worked in the field of conductive polymers for a year, and I'm fairly familiar with what the state of the art was in 2002-3, and let me assure you, nothing that's been developed at this point is remotely close to being as conductive as copper.
There has been some minor success with organic (polymer) semiconductors, but you're not going to be seeing any plastic wiring in a laptop any time soon. Even if it is perfected in the next five years -- which it won't be -- copper is still going to be several orders of magnitude cheaper, and thus more cost-efficient.
p
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