This week the main issue I worked on with Emanuel was making our solenoids stronger and generating more force to push our carrier forward. As I mentioned last week I was initially confused about our calculations as we were generating a lot of magnetic field strength but our results were not reflective of this. What I hadn’t realized was that I was using the wrong equation when it came to doing calculations in our case. We should have been using the short solenoid estimate version of the equation found here. With this equation, we were able to realize that our initial calculations referred to the magnetic field with the center of the solenoid where the steel core was not outside or near the solenoid. In reality, there should have been a factor of the equation accounting for how far the carrier was from the solenoid itself. This same equation had a radius factor, so making our solenoid wider, would make the solenoid more effective. We are also considering lessening our levitation required to make the z factor in the equation less in order to give us even more force. In our case, we find that we had too much levitation as opposed to too little. Going into next week, I would like to attach our improved coils to our printed track and see what design changes need to be made before our demo.