Japan Seeks Rare-Earth Alternatives for Motors

We had "free of rare earth"-magnets in the time of AlNiCo Magnets.

But these are much more on weight and size for the same performance and use costly Cobalt.

And you are not allowed to open any magnetic circuit else you will demagnetise the magnets (not totally but to be useless).

So either use spacers of iron or steel if opening the magnetic (nearly) closed loop or allow a magnetising coil and a high current magnetiser. This needs near 2 Tesla for 20 to 50 ms.

To achieve 1 Tesla you need near 1 million amp x turns at a length of the coil of 1 meter.

The duration of a pulse is needed because of necessary decay of eddy currents.

Have fun, try with a bank of foil capacitors (or high grade electrolytics if fired not often).

If fired too often then electrolytics will give very unexpected blow-off performance.

Connect with thick copper bars, charge the capacitors with a current limiting resistor (a 100 W bulb is a cheap choice) and use a big -very big- switch from a small power station to nearly short-circuit the capacitors into a coil of 1 to 10 turns.

We regularly disrupted our test coils until we started to secure these with glass-fiber epoxi - axially and radially!

Think about some thick shield to protect you from pieces from capacitors and inductors. Submerge below 10cm of dry sand will be a good idea.

Think about the resistors needed parallel to the capacitors to ensure near zero charge if there are low ion-currents or other stray currents nearby. Air-refreshing ionisers (-4.5KV!!!) will destroy most capacitors at a much lower voltage and cripple you if touching open capacitors (or relying on some insulator that is good for the capacitor rating but no good for the 4.5KV). That's why you need a short circuiting bar or resistor to bring down the possible voltage and charge.

5 J is said to be harmless - but this is the energy in a hammer of 1 Kg (2.2 lbs) falling from a height of half a meter (20"), if your thumb is in between a hard piece of anything and the hammer it will not only be lovely colored for some time but accompanied by a lovely song from you.

RHABE

A great lesson to be learned here folks, and this little exercise shouldn't be any kind of surprise to anyone. China announced a number of years ago that they were going to dominate worldwide control over the metals industry, in every corner of the globe and every element that they could. Lo and behold the day has come. They have their fingers in almost every development in mining in almost every country in the world and are still going further. We have also allowed our stockpiles to dwindle to the point where our industries are also dependent on China for alloys and rare earths.

We have also given to China for a very low cost, (just enough profits to show a good bottom line) the most advanced technology in industry to make the products that are putting us out of business.

Our government has allowed their imports, with favored tarrifs, to wipe out our total and safe canned seafood industry (check out your supermarket) with we don't know what is in the cans anymore. Result of the WTO.

All for short term Harvard MBA bottom line, and naive business from wall st. (you notice I didn't show the respect a street name earns)

U.S. is re-opening 2 mines as we speak since the Chinese sand-bagged the market for years to get the competition to close up. Rare earth is used in smart bombs and the U.S. military wont be hostage to China for the product. Nothing else is equal to the rare earth in high tech Military applications unfortunately. Japan better make up with China for awhile until it can be sourced from the U.S.

I think someone might be forgetting that everything is available in the ocean...

also, might be forgetting that everything is available in canada.. :) (70%rock)

china has labour...

I think someone might be pandering (oops Chinese thingy) to 'populist xenophobia'.

Had they been American citizens, what 'incentives' would you expect the US to 'offer' Japan?

How would you see the 'Japanese urgency to negate the leverage' the US used to secure their return?

Somewhat different picture now - isn't it?