Genius Hour: Core Testing Results

I got my model to work and I was able to set up all of my cores. I have a ferrite core, a laminated core, an iron core, and an air core, all of which service a different purpose. The goal of the cores that I am testing is to see which core works best with a brushless motor-generator, which has no contact. This is why I predict that the material with the lowest electrical conductivity and the highest magnetic permeability will do the best.
The first core I am testing is the ferrite core. Ferrite is a metal alloy, composed of different elements such as iron oxides, nickel, zinc, and manganese, and is commonly used in wiring due to its noted success in reducing Eddy Currents. I hypothesized that this core would perform the best out of the four cores because it was specifically designed to reduce the amount of losses in wiring in order to conserve electricity, and I predicted that this feature would also work well with my project.
The second core I am testing is a laminated core. A laminated core sounds fancy, but is simply just a conductive material that is separated by thin pieces of a non-conductive material. For my laminated core, I used coated paper clips to form the core, as the inside has small pieces of iron and is separated by thin layers of rubber. The separation of the conductive material is a proven method in reducing Eddy Currents, but I did not think the less-efficient iron in the core would be able to match the makeup of ferrite.
The last two cores I tested were an iron core and an air core. The iron core is simply a core of solid iron, which was supposed to represent a conductive material with a lot of Eddy Currents that cause inefficiency. The other core I tested was an air core, which is a core of non-conductive material, and I was hoping to compare the efficiencies of the iron core to the air core because even though the magnetic field of the air core was much weaker than even the iron core, since the air core was not conductive, the core would have no deficiencies from Eddy Currents.
As far as my results go, the ferrite core, by a great margin, performed the best out of the four cores. However, one thing that I found very interesting was that the iron core actually outperformed the laminated core. One reason that I can think of for this is that the rubber on the paperclips was possibly too thick, and so even though the diameter of the cores were the same, the excess rubber meant that there as a lot less conductive material in the laminated core. Even though the laminated core had less Eddy Currents reducing its efficiency, it just could not produce a strong enough magnetic field to compare with the less efficient yet stronger magnetic field that the iron core possessed. Another thing that I found was the air core performed the worst, which was predicted, but also the air core also could not reach a velocity higher than 2000 RPM, while all of the others could reach from 3000 to 5000 RPM.

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