I’ve worked in a factory for almost fifteen years, and hear the term “solenoid” tossed around a lot by maintenance. I have no idea what one is, so I smile and nod.
In: Engineering
It’s a railgun with a stopper / break / or limitation somewhere.
An ELI5 that was explained to me, I realize this would not actually work it’s imaginary.
Imagine some not magnetic pipe (plastic), with a rod in the middle. Wrap a jumper cable all the way around with positive and negative hanging off either end.
The only thing magic about this is that the jumper cables you’re familiar with are not precise enough nor is the battery in your car strong enough at the scale I think I’m painting.
Pop either end of your jumper cables onto a battery and an electric field shoots instantly through the cable from the negative to the positive. At the same time, the magnetic fields around the wire overlap in the middle and push the rod out the top just launching it far away.
Putting the rod back, and swapping the sides of the cable (in a way just turning the pipe upside down) launches the rod into the ground.
That’s a cool gun but its no good for a solenoid. Give our rod a long + shape, and our pipe a shape like two brackets [ ]. The middle of our + gets caught on the edges of the brackets and doesn’t launch. It just stays stuck until the power is turned off or reversed.
There are a lot of ways to stop a solenoid from launching but I thought just running into the pipe was the most ELI5. This rod can be used to push and pull objects, gases, or whatever depending on the parts. I personally have used small ones to make an Arduino push buttons on remotes but remain modular. These are so small and have so little force that they do impact the pipe with a little bit of padding.
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