Expert: Cleggsan - 1/9/2009

Question
hey!!! How have you been?  So I got bitten by the project bug again!  I wanted to play around with making a killer tactile transducer.  I thought it might be super easy and cheap to get a nice big ceramic disc magnet like 5 inches in diameter and an inch or 2 thick, run a bolt through it, use some Plexiglas on each end of the bolt to give it some nice suspension, and then wind a coil around it (with a small gap of course) just keep wrapping till I get to 4 ohms and lacquer the coil so it’s all stuck together and bam, instant effect.  My question is, I’m wondering if the magnetic field will be aligned properly.  I think all the disc magnets have the north and south on the flat surface of the magnet and the coil of wire will be nearest the edge of the magnet.  So will it be extremely inefficient because of this?  I realized in a speaker there's the top and bottom plates sandwiching the magnet and it seems the purpose is to focus the field from the surfaces into the magnetic gap. I won’t have any of that.   so what do you think?
Thanks!

Answer
I don't get the vision of this as to how/where you are going to apply the forces to get the motion.  But, it will always work if you obey the laws of electricity.   The big problem is getting a strong enough concentration of flux density or guess to provide the forces you will  need to move what seems like a heavy mass.  But, give it a try; seems easy enough to build a model.

Let me know the outcome.  Good luck,
C