Case Study Of The Copper Wire Subway

Copper Wire Subway.

The Flaming Lizards

Miranda Zuroske, Halie Lindberg, Maira Hernandez

2nd Hour

The copper wire subway is a way to make great fun and somewhat simple way to show how a magnetized pull can move an object. Our objective is to make the battery strong enough with the magnetic pull of four magnets to propel it through a length of copper wire.

Materials

5lb Rare Earth Magnets

Neodymuim-Iron-Boron-Rare-Earth-Magnet

Rayovac Double Aa Battery

Rayovac Triple AAA Battery

2 Energizer A23 9 Volt Batteries

14 Gauge Copper Wire

26 Gauge Copper wire

16 Gauge Copper Wire

PROCEDURE

To make the copper wire subway, our directions stated that we needed to coil the copper wire, connect the magnets to the batteries and put them

We also changed our type of magnets, we bought bigger ones that seemed to improve our results only slightly. Scrubbing the copper wire with a steel wool pad and pure acetone was suggested to try tp get to the real source of the copper wire because we thought that maybe our store bought copper wire was covered in some sort of chemical coating that we could scrub off with the steel wool pads and that the pure acetone would take off the remaining chemical coating that we could not get off with a steel wool pad. Although doing this seemed to work with only some of our copper wires we did this to all of our coils to see if they produced the same results.

As a group we then agreed that the thick copper solid copper electrical wire that we had first started to use was the wire that was giving off the best results when we tested it with a multimeter wire tester. This wire was giving off the best ratings and was giving off a weak magnetic pull between the copper wire the battery and the

Also we thought that coiling the wire was very difficult and that it was not the wire that was the issue with why our experiment was not working. After we started to change all of the variables and our experiment still did not seem to have positive results we decided that maybe our coils were the issue. We then recoiled the wire around a smaller object and got it come up with a reaction with the multimeter. Making sure that the coils were only slightly bigger than the batter we sent the battery through the copper wire and let it sit trying to think of more ways to make this work. After letting the battery sit inside of the wire we pulled out the magnet to find it to be warm, it was not like the battery was super hot and was going to catch on fire or anything it just seemed to be warmer than it was when we inserted it to the copper coiled