The hoverboard

The hoverboard

Intro

We are going to present you our newest invention: the hoverboard.

Well it isn’t recent because you must have heard of it with the movie Back to the future part II where a young man uses one to escape villains. However, in the movie the board does not really fly but we managed to make this board levitate and move forward.

It took us a few years to discover how we could realize this invention but here we are to explain to you how we did.

Concept

So as its name implies it the hoverboard, the hover board is an hoving board. It levitates at 8 inches from the ground. The board can go on any kind of land; however, we didn’t succeed in making the board floating on water because of the chemicals components of water.

Technical presentation

The board is 10 inches large, and 33 inches long.

It exists in different colors

How it works

The Slide relies on something called flux pinning, as well as a principle called the Meissner effect. And this all works because of something called superconduction.  Superconduction is a complete disappearance of electrical resistance in a substance especially at very low temperatures.

A superconductor is a material cooled to a very low critical temperature that, when you run a current through it, experiences no electrical resistance (the material doesn’t push back against the current). When a material becomes a superconductor it pushes away any magnetic fields inside it. This is known as the Meissner effect.

The Slide hoverboard contains a series of metal alloy superconducting blocks cooled to -197°C by reservoirs of liquid nitrogen. The track below contains three magnets that induce a current in the blocks, causing the Meissner effect to take hold and expel the magnetic field back towards the track in a mirror image.

These mirroring magnetic forces repel each other and so the board is lifted above the track. Even if someone stands on the board, the magnetic forces are strong enough to keep it levitating because the lack of electrical resistance in the superconductor means the magnetic field can adjust to deal with external pressure.

But another scientific phenomenon makes the hoverboard even more stable. When the cooling process is switched on and the blocks in the board become supercondutors, they effectively trap the lines of the magnetic field from the track. This causes the blocks to be pinned at a fixed height above the track, a process known as flux pinning, which provides much more stable levitation. Flux pinning ensures the hoverboard doesn’t deviate either horizontally or vertically from the track.

Commercialisation

You can buy the board in a deacthlon’s store.

It costs 1399 $.

Conclusion

We created a hoverboard.

THE END

...