Trying Out Viewer Suggestions for Levitation on an Induction Cooker

Diablo

New member
cd_levitation_fail_brainiac75_youtube.jpg


Doing something once is fun, but if you get interesting feedback from viewers on how to make things even more fun, you can only follow all of these instructions and put more random objects on top of an induction cooker, as [Brainiac75] fortunately did.

Much like in the first video, the goal here is to use the Lorentz force that is induced in the object for levitation, ideally without having said object depart for orbit, melt into a puddle of molten metal or be a general hazard to anyone standing in the same room.

aluminium_levitation_brainiac75_youtube.jpg


Some of the suggestions were rather benign, such as improving the aluminium foil ring by adding four times more layers to create more mass. Unfortunately adding more layers here had the device refuse to turn on due to the absence of a suitable ferromagnetic target. The difference between the working versions with one to three layers was here also not really noticeable. Various aluminium and copper tape configurations were then attempted, but without much success.

Of note is that while levitating, the metal gets pretty hot. At one point a CD even gets melted to aluminium foil. Even the use of water-filled aluminium cans will only give you so much time, and ramping down the power level on the induction cooker only revealed that this particular model operates only at either at full blast or off. Correspondingly a new induction cooker with claimed constant output was obtained for the next experiments at lower levels.

Interestingly, it was this new induction cooker set to a more reasonable output level that showed the first reasonably static levitation results without immediate conflagration or molten metal splatter risk. Whether this is the kind of levitation display that you want to set up in your living room in lieu of a boring magnetic one is still a good question, but at least this demonstration got downgraded to something potentially safe enough to play around with in a physics class.
 
Back
Top