Yes you are right, the technology around magnetism is evolving very fast. Anyway we need to implement a solution before waiting for the perfect material to appear... thom
Well yes this is the first patent. And further patents with more technological solutions are pending to complete the protection of the full concept. You can see on this first patent that the original idea was quite naive ! We did the very first protoype during the summer 2004 (we called it the "post
What I learned from the engineers working on the prototypes is that the variation is of 0,0018Hz / °C, which is far too much for a movement beating at 6Hz to reach the COSC. So either the temperature variations will have to be mechanically compensated (a few solutions are on the way,... hopefully we
This time, there were 5 working prototypes on the Basel booth. You might say that it's a shame to show non finalised concepts, but it's the only way to make big steps. Like you can see on this forum, skeptical comments could have killed the project. Once you have the working prototypes, you can star
I think those images would have been slightly too technical for the press file ! Only purists could appreciate them. Let's chek with the ingeneers on tuesday what could be shown. Best thom
Point by point : No need of a balance wheel if the magnets would have a larger radius : need to be studied. It would be a complete reconstrustruction of the system and I have no idea of the answer... It's true that with a larger diameter it would be easier to "tune" the inertia of the balance wheel.
The system might need to be protected from external magnetic fields. May be not a lot more than a standard hair spring, but definitely a lot more than a non magnetic hairspring...
Tha mass of the rotating magnet (the rotor) is not enough to replace the balance wheel. But why not in a completely new conception ! The spring has been replaced by magnetic fields because magnetic fields have no mass. The problem with the hair spring is that its gravity center is different from its