• Question: I have an idea for hoverboards,using the power of magnets put them under roads using south or north,does not matter but using the same side of the magnet for the board.my question is would this be a good idea or would there not be enough?

    Asked by howard wollowitz to Aaron, Abbey, Keith, Natalie, Pete on 12 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Peter Burgess

      Peter Burgess answered on 12 Nov 2015:

      Maybe it won’t work for hoverboards but there are some train lines that use something similar to this technology. Usually called Maglev (short for Magnetic levitation), they use a special electromagnetic track to lift the train off the track and to drive the train forwards.
      They are really cool and really fast, but they are also really expensive to build so there’s only a few in the world. Shanghai airport has one to shuttle passengers into the city, and Japan has been looking at building a national network.
      I guess somebody has done the sums to work out the magnetic field strength needed to lift your hoverboard off the ground, and therefore how much magnetic material you would need.

    • Photo: Aaron Boardley

      Aaron Boardley answered on 12 Nov 2015:

      Great thinking! In fact, this is how magnetic levitation (or ‘MagLev’) trains work – take a look at them online!

      There is definitely a way to get enough magnetic strength to get things to hover off the ground – you can find it out by doing calculations and then experiments to test. The big factor here, though, is cost – digging up the ground and installing hundreds and hundreds of magnets would cost a lot of money. That might sound boring but it’s a factor that engineers have to consider all the time – if something is technically possible, sometimes it doesn’t happen because it would just take too much money and disruption.

    • Photo: Natalie Garrett

      Natalie Garrett answered on 13 Nov 2015:

      Tony Hawk actually rode a magnetic hoverboard this time last year: http://theridechannel.com/features/2014/11/tony-hawk-rides-hoverboard

      The difference with that hoverboard is that they need a conductive surface rather than a magnet, because they induce a magnetic field in it. This is cheaper than using magnets, because they’re expensive and pretty rare compared with conducting metals.

      The main downside to using magnets on roads for this idea it that it would be mega expensive and time consuming to make all the roads magnetised. If you used metallic conducting surfaces instead, you’d still spend a lot of money on it, and metal isn’t really durable enough to use on roads for heavy lorries and trucks.

      Perhaps in the future, imaginative people like you will come up with solutions to these technical problems, and make this happen for real!

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