Electromagnetic Lab
Electromagnetic Lab
This is one of the few labs we do in Physical Science class, and in this lab, we will be making electromagnets. The purpose of this lab was to make electromagnets and explore how they work. By making our own, we will be able to better understand how they work. Here are the questions we have to test out and answer:
1. Does the number of times you wrap the wire around the nail affect the strength of the nail?
2. Does the thickness or length of the nail affect the electromagnetic's strength?
3. Does the thickness of the wire affect the power of the electromagnet?
The materials we need are
1. A large iron nail
2. 3 feet of thin coated copper wire
3. A fresh D size battery
4. Some paper clips and other magnetic objects
Here are pictures of the materials we used for the lab. (Pictures on the bottom)
The first thing we did was wrap the thin green wire around the nail as close together as possible while leaving out a few inches to spare. We were able to wrap it around 63 times, but the picture to the left is just an example of how it looked like when we were wrapping the wire. The picture on the right shows the wire connected to the battery to generate the nail a magnetic force in order to attract the paper clip. However, we just learned the hard way that if you keep the wire charged from the battery long enough, it burns your finger, so watch out!
The second thing we did was test out whether or not the thickness and length of the nail would affect the strength of the magnet. It turned out, the longer nail had a faster reaction, so our answer is yes, the longer the nail, the stronger the elecotronmagentic force. We tested it out by coiling the green wire around two different types of nails and connected it to the battery.
The third question was kind of similar to the second question in terms of testing it out. The only difference was that we wrapped the red wire around the nail, timed how long it took to heat up, measured how strong the magnetic force was, and then repeated for the green wire. It turns out that the red wire made the battery heat up much faster, but the magnetic force was weaker since the wire was thinner. Meanwhile, the green wire took quite a while, but the magnetic force was much stronger and attracted the paper clip faster.
