On Tue, 17 Dec 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>> There are gyros which use electrostatic levitation of a spherical rotor in
>> a vacuum...
>
> I also had a thought along this line, but using magnetic levitation in
> air or vacuum.
The problem with magnetic levitation is that magnets are dipoles, so the
slightest magnetization of the rotor will cause the suspension field to
exert torques. The exception to this, of course, is if the rotor is
superconducting... and people did experiment with superconducting gyros,
but the cooling requirements were annoying enough to make it unattractive.
Making the rotor for a levitated gyro is non-trivial, by the way. You
want the rotor to have a preferred axis of rotation, so its rotation will
be stable; just a perfect sphere won't do. (Besides, it wouldn't be truly
perfect, and for high-class gyros quite small imperfections can matter.)
However, I'm not sufficiently at home with the technology to say how much
of this concern was because the people building electrostatic gyros were
aiming for very high accuracy.
Henry Spencer
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
_______________________________________________
ERPS-list mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
