Terra Magnetica

I saw an intriguing news item over at the Magnetism & Electromagnetics Interest Group yesterday, and I see that it’s starting to make its way into the press.  The Huntsville Times is reporting that “Larry Fullerton, formerly of Time Domain, has developed a process to ‘program’ magnetic and electromagnetic materials so they will only attract or repel a particular mated magnet, with specific force at a specific distance and in a specific position”.  Mr. Fullerton has co-founded Correlated Magnetics Research [CMR] to market these products, and from the looks of their About Us page, is a prolific inventor.

According to the CMR Web site, “Recent pioneering innovations involving magnetic structures having designs based on signal correlation and coding theory enable magnetic forces to be precisely controlled to achieve desired alignment, coupling force, and release force characteristics, and to produce unique magnetic identities to control how these magnetic structures interact.    These new structures are referred to as Correlated Magnets and Coded Magnets™.   Coded Magnets are programmed so that they have multiple polarities that correspond to magnetic identities that determine how they interact with other correlated magnets”.  Fig. 1 depicts a magnetic field scan of a Coded Magnet programmed using a particular configuration, which CMR calls Code A.

The CMR web site goes on to say that “Coded Magnets having complementary coding have one spatial alignment where each magnetic source, or maxel, of each magnet is aligned with a complementary magnetic source from the other magnet. When complementary Coded Magnets are aligned, all the maxel pairs produce a peak attractive force. For all other translational or rotational alignments, the maxels cancel each other out. The forces produced between two complementary Coded Magnets vary based on their spatial alignment.”

Sounds very intriguing and definitely worth checking out.