Purpose
The idea for the Coulomb Pucks is to create small conductive puck-shaped objects that will be mostly covered in some sort of insulating material. The pucks will be paired, charged up to a given voltage as a capacitor, then separated. The idea is that these pucks, optimized to hold a steady charge for a reasonable amount of time, would then be able to be used for demonstrating electromagnetic forces when put in motion on something akin to an air hockey table.
My Project
My project was to find a way to model the electric field and electric potential surrounding a puck, and then to experiment with the dimensions of the puck to minimize the field along surfaces that would not be covered by insulating material. I did this by numerically approximating a solution to Laplace's equation for the area surrounding a puck using finite element methods and programming in Java. I also used Mathematica to graph the output of my Java code, as I can't see anything useful in giant matrices of numbers.
Code
Results
Ongoing Work
My friend Lyle is doing some continuing work on this project this term (Spring 2011), also with Professor Skinner. He is working on the difficulties of building the pucks to the specifications needed for the particular type of insulating Professor Skinner wants to use. More on that when I have more information myself.
Presentation
