The Create the Future Design Contest was launched in 2002 by the publishers of NASA Tech Briefs magazine to help stimulate and reward engineering innovation. The annual event has attracted more than 8 000 product design ideas from engineers, entrepreneurs, and students worldwide.
Ultra-High-Efficiency Self-Regulating Symmetrical Homopolar Motor with a Circular Rotor
Thank you for your comment. This type of single-turn homopolar motor has few practical application, if any, because the torque produced is too small. It has, however, great potential in STEM education for future scientists and engineers. Some science teachers of today may demonstrate to the kids how to build a motor by having them wind a long thin wire since the textbook says so. It takes so much time, and the complexity of having to carefully wind the coil wire many times without breaking it and to remove enamel from the enamelled coil wire at both ends turns off the kids with short attention span. The simplicity of homopolar motor, not the fancy ones with bells and whistles on YouTube but the simple one above with nothing but an AA battery, a rare-earth magnet and a copper wire with only 1 bend point, teaches the fundamental principle of physics, i.e., relationship between electricity and magnetism (Maxwell's Equations), just as well. Together with another simple demonstration of "Anisotropic Electromagnetic Force Phenomena" (shown below with the N-N Attraction, etc.) which inspires kids to challenge "My teacher and the textbook are wrong!", it could encourage them to pursue career in STEM fields to make new discoveries and inventions for the future of human civilisation.
Quote (Albert Einstein)
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
Quote (Albert Szent-Gyorgyi)
"Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought."
BTW, The "Ultra-High-Efficiency Self-Regulating Symmetrical Homopolar Motor with a Circular Rotor" has been submitted to the Guinness World Records as "The Simplest Homopolar Motor".
