How do magnetic brakes work?

[Brookes]

I remember a post by UC a while ago where he said that it was a common misconception that magnetic brakes worked by the brakes being positively/negatively charged, and the train the other and then they attract and it slows the train down. This is how I thought they worked, so how do magnetic brakes actually work?

 

[Anonymous]

If you read through the last part in the article about brakes at Coastersandmore.de then you will know how they work:
http://coastersandmore.de/rides/brake/brake.shtml
(note it's in German so you you might need a translation of the thing before, if you don't know German that is...)

Or you could read the article about "Eddy current brakes" on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_current_brake

 

[Snoo]

Well that clears up some of my misconceptions, but I had the basic properties down. Thank you Discovery Channel for doing that.. lol

 

[Anonymous]

I would really recommend people that are interested in how coasters work to read through the articles that are posted in the "Coaster Basic" section on www.coastersandmore.de . It's really a shame that they haven't been translated into English since they are written in such a way that they are easy to understand but still have all the info you will need to get how the things work, but Google translate (or other) usually gives a satisfactory (at least it's way better than translating from Japanese, etc.) result so that you will be able to read it.

I would also recommended the rest of the articles, especially those posted in the "Ride Insight" section, they have a lot of useful informations and feature a lot of great images...

 

[bob_3_]

ignore! this link was already posted.

Yeah, look up eddy currents.

 

[Brookes]

Thanks for all the links guys they have been really helpful and now I think I understand how they work. I do understand quite a bit of German and had a little read of that article and understood some things in it, so thanks!

 

[msep003]

Magnetic Brakes cost lots of money but theme parks should save on maintenance .

BTMRR and Ragng Spirit in TDL and TDS got the Magnetic Brakes .

 

[Anonymous]

^ Right... That really had not much to do with this topic...

^^ I'm glad that the article helped, as I said before, it's a shame that those articles aren't translated to English since they are really good...