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Scientists Accidentally Blow Up Their Lab With Strongest Indoor Magnetic Field Ever (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Tokyo accidentally created the strongest controllable magnetic field in history and blew the doors of their lab in the process. As detailed in a paper recently published in the Review of Scientific Instruments, the researchers produced the magnetic field to test the material properties of a new generator system. They were expecting to reach peak magnetic field intensities of around 700 Teslas, but the machine instead produced a peak of 1,200 Teslas. (For the sake of comparison, a refrigerator magnet has about 0.01 Tesla)
In both the Japanese and Russian experiments, the magnetic fields were generated using a technique called electromagnetic flux-compression. This technique causes a brief spike in the strength of the magnetic field by rapidly "squeezing" it to a smaller size. [...] Instead of using TNT to generate their magnetic field, the Japanese researchers dumped a massive amount of energy -- 3.2 megajoules -- into the generator to cause a weak magnetic field produced by a small coil to rapidly compress at a speed of about 20,000 miles per hour. This involves feeding 4 million amps of current through the generator, which is several thousand times more than a lightning bolt. When this coil is compressed as small as it will go, it bounces back. This produces a powerful shockwave that destroyed the coil and much of the generator. To protect themselves from the shockwave, the Japanese researchers built an iron cage for the generator. However they only built it to withstand about 700 Teslas, so the shockwave from the 1,200 Teslas ended up blowing out the door to the enclosure. While this is the strongest magnetic filed ever generated in a controlled, indoor environment, the strongest magnetic field produced in history belongs to some Russian researchers who created a 2,800 Tesla magnetic field in 2001.
In both the Japanese and Russian experiments, the magnetic fields were generated using a technique called electromagnetic flux-compression. This technique causes a brief spike in the strength of the magnetic field by rapidly "squeezing" it to a smaller size. [...] Instead of using TNT to generate their magnetic field, the Japanese researchers dumped a massive amount of energy -- 3.2 megajoules -- into the generator to cause a weak magnetic field produced by a small coil to rapidly compress at a speed of about 20,000 miles per hour. This involves feeding 4 million amps of current through the generator, which is several thousand times more than a lightning bolt. When this coil is compressed as small as it will go, it bounces back. This produces a powerful shockwave that destroyed the coil and much of the generator. To protect themselves from the shockwave, the Japanese researchers built an iron cage for the generator. However they only built it to withstand about 700 Teslas, so the shockwave from the 1,200 Teslas ended up blowing out the door to the enclosure. While this is the strongest magnetic filed ever generated in a controlled, indoor environment, the strongest magnetic field produced in history belongs to some Russian researchers who created a 2,800 Tesla magnetic field in 2001.
Oh please, since we are in a supposedly nerd site let's use hard drive motor magnet instead.
Those are pretty powerful as anyone curious enough to dismantle one drive would certainly know. Those are 1 tesla magnets.
1) Responding as AC because I spent mod points;
:-)
2) Engineers do not use a error margin of 10x for everything, this would end up into unacceptable costs. But having said that, indeed they will try to put a generous margin of error on anything new or experimental;
3) The guys in the lab are scientists, not engineers. This answer your question?
Headline says they blew up their lab.
First sentence says they 'blew the doors of their lab'.
By the end of the quote it's become merely 'blowing out the door to the enclosure'
Such a tiny example of the death of journalism and the abandonment of the sanctity of objective and empirical truth. It flourishes everywhere, compliments of the Internet, the scabies of social media that live on it, and those who prefer happy lies to perhaps dour truths. Scoff all you want, it's not yet too late to become who you think you are already.
It's not the governments, it's not the propaganda "they're" feeding people. It's us. We've become trash.
This is how science should work ... a successful test, some major carnage to show how cool your work is, and major bragging rights for how much of a "boom" you made.
Not really. It's fine when you are doing what these guys are doing but, as a particle physicist who worked on the Large Hadron Collider, the "major carnage" crazy people worried about us causing was end-of-the-world carnage. While it is true that we would have had amazing bragging rights for creating the biggest bang in the now much sorter history of humanity, speaking personally, that's the sort of bragging we can quite literally all live without.
Of course, the reason the LHC was safe actually relied on observation more than calculation. Cosmic rays striking the Earth can create collisions with energies well above what the LHC and yet despite their best efforts over the past 4.5 billion years the planet is still here.