The electromagnet was part of an electromagnet design competition in my high school physics class in which we were given a fixed amount of wire, a battery, and were tasked with building the strongest electromagnet possible. We were also given iron/steel bars to use as a core, but could have bought other supplies for the core as well. This was the only project done in high school that I could say actually involved an engineering design approach. I began by understanding the problem and found that the magnetic field strength of a solenoid is proportional the current, number of wires and the magnetic permeability of the medium. Given that the current and number of wires were fixed, the only variable to explore is the magnetic permeability. The only constraint was that the magnet had to lift a load of at least 5kg, with the more load lifted the better. After brainstorming several ideas, creating somewhat divergent solutions as shown in figure #1, I considered which ones would allow for the highets magnetic permeability. I selected the approach which lead to the highest magnetic permeability, which was the third sketch from the right, or the design shown in figure #2. This design uses an iron core in the middle as it has a higher magnetic permeability than steel, and also has an iron pipie surrounding, which is then attached to an iron 'dome' on the top. This allowed for the highets magnetic permeability among the other two designs as it allows some of the field lines to pass through this iron, as shown in figure #1, which makes the magnetic field stronger since the magnetic permeability of iron is much greater than that of air. The final magnet lifted around 40kg.

 

This illustrates my ability to understand the problem as part of my design process, and also diverge and create multiple solutions and then select an approach according to what design elements I find most valuable. This shows that I had a crude, but nonetheless existing design process going into Praxis, as my design process does not include iteration nor is it facilitated by the use of decision making/creation tools.