from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- adj. Having symmetrically equal distribution of polarity
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- In morphology, having equal poles: said of the figures called stauraxonia homopola. See stauraxonia.
- In electricity, same as unipolar, 1.
This is the simplest form of a class of devices called homopolar motors.
I've gotta tell you, the website linked on Boing Boing about how to make a homopolar motor in 30 seconds is false.
This is by far the coolest do-it-yerself project I've ever seen -- I've known about homopolar motors for a long time, but never thought it would be this easy to build one.
The paper briefly reviews the homopolar generator, describes the tests on this particular machine, summarizes and presents tentative conclusions from the resulting data.
Known for over 150 years, the Faraday homopolar generator has been claimed to provide a basis for so-called "free-energy" generation, in that under certain conditions the extraction of electrical output energy is not reflected as a corresponding mechanical load to the driving source.