Re: Incorrect force direction

["Rob " <rtickle@xxxxxxxx>]

--- In femm@xxxxxxxxxxx, "Greg Watson" <gowatson@xxxx> wrote:
> Hi Rob,
> 
> I'll see what I can do over the weekend.
> 
> One of the basics of my "seat of the pants" approach to estimating 
ferromagnetic
> force direction is that a MMF source will be drawn toward a area of 
lower
> magnetic reluctance.
> 
> The area of the rails and volume of the air to the right of the 
magnet should
> show lower magnetic reluctance than that to the left of the magnet 
due to the
> larger amount of inward facing rail surface and larger air volume 
between the
> parallel rails and thus the magnet should be drawn into a equal & 
balanced
> magnetic reluctance neutral point in the horizontal centre of the 
parallel bars.

I tend to agree with this, that is what my intuition says also, which 
is why this is an interesting problem. I think what the calculation 
might be saying is that the difference in reluctance between the 2 
sides becomes small enough to be down in the noise sooner than when 
your intuition might lead you to believe... I'm tempted to build this 
myself now and play around with it.