Word: electromagnetism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Japanese maglev sits in a low, troughlike guideway, paved with two rows of metal boxes containing aluminum coils. Built into the car's undercarriage are six superconducting electromagnets. When one of them passes over an unmagnetized coil, a current -- and an accompanying magnetic field -- is induced in the coil. The magnetic field in the track has the same polarity as the electromagnet and, since like poles repel, the train levitates off the guideway. As the electromagnet moves faster and faster over the coils, the magnetic force becomes more powerful, raising the car to its cruising height...
...obstacles remain. One is the need to form the new materials into usable shapes. While metals bend, anyone who has dropped a dinner plate knows that ceramics do not. And a flexible material has a big advantage over a brittle one if it is to be coiled around an electromagnet. Says Osamu Horigami, chief researcher at Toshiba's Energy Science and Technology Laboratory: "To get a magnet or coil or even a wire we could use with complete confidence could take another five years." Agrees Hulm: "It will take extraordinary engineering to solve the brittleness problem...
...item is on everyone's list of potential benefits of high-temperature super-conductors: maglevs, or magnetically levitated superfast trains. It is a safe prediction, since the new materials give promise of electromagnets far more powerful and economical than those in use today. And it is the electromagnet that lifts and propels existing maglevs in Japan, West Germany and Britain...