How do motors use magnets

For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. Almost anything that uses a motor or electricity to operate is built with magnets. That means cars also have them. In fact, magnets can be found in multiple places other than the motor in some cars. Unlike traditional automobiles, electric cars are powered by electricity rather than gas, so they have no tank. Wireress charging Wireless charging methods Electromagnetic induction Qi wireless Promotions Organization.

What is a Motor? How Does a Motor Work? What is a sensor? What is wireless? What is a printhead? MEMS-related terminology. Circuit Simulation Flow and Device Model. The final piece of any DC electric motor is the stator. In this motor, it's formed by the can itself plus two curved permanent magnets.

In DC motors, the armature is the rotor , and the field is the stator. As we noted earlier, the rotor is like the nail in our diagram of an electromagnet. The commutator is also attached to the axle. The commutator is simply a pair of plates attached to the axle.

These plates provide the two connections for the coil of the electromagnet. The "flipping the electric field" part of an electric motor is accomplished by two parts: the commutator and the brushes.

The diagram shows how the commutator in green and brushes in red work together to let current flow to the electromagnet, and also to flip the direction that the electrons are flowing at just the right moment. The contacts of the commutator are attached to the axle of the electromagnet, so they spin with the magnet.

The brushes are just two pieces of springy metal or carbon that make contact with the contacts of the commutator. The key is that as the rotor passes through the horizontal position, the poles of the electromagnet flip. Because of the flip, the north pole of the electromagnet is always above the axle so it can repel the stator's north pole and attract the stator's south pole.

Usually the rotor will have three poles rather than the two poles as shown in this article. There are two good reasons for a motor to have three poles:. It is possible to have any number of poles, depending on the size of the motor and what it needs to do. Now, we're going to look at the AC motor. AC motors use alternating current instead of direct current. It shares many parts with a DC motor, and it still relies on electromagnetism and flipping magnetic fields to generate mechanical power.

The winding of the stator in an AC motor kind of does the job of the rotor of a DC motor. In this case, it's a ring of electromagnets that are paired up and energized in sequence, which creates the rotating magnetic field.

You'll remember that the rotor in a DC motor is hooked up to the battery. But the rotor in an AC motor does not have any direct connection to a power source. Nor does it have brushes. Instead, it often uses something called a squirrel cage. You read that right. The squirrel cage in an AC motor is a set of rotor bars connected to two rings, one at either end. It's kind of like something a caged mouse or squirrel would run inside.

The squirrel cage rotor goes inside the stator. When AC power is sent through the stator, it creates an electromagnetic field. The bars in the squirrel cage rotor are conductors, so they respond to the flipping of the stator's poles. That's how the rotor rotates, which creates its own magnetic field.

The key to an AC induction motor, where the field of the rotor is induced by the field of the stator, is that the rotor is always trying to catch up. The coil of wire is mounted in the gap between the two magnets.

The split rings make electrical contact with the coil and reverse the current every half turn. When an electric current flows through the coil, a force is exerted on the coil, causing it to spin.