You have a summer job working at a company developing systems to safely lower large loads down ramps. Your team is investigating a magnetic system by modeling it in the laboratory. The safety system is a horizontal conducting bar that can slide on two parallel conducting rails running down the sides of the ramp. At the bottom of the ramp, the two rails are connected to a power supply. The magnetic field is uniform and vertical. Required:
Your task is to calculate the maximum power supply voltage which holds the bar stationary, as a function of the mass of the bar, the strength of the magnetic field, the angle of the ramp from the horizontal, the length of the bar which is the same as the distance between the tracks, and the resistance of the bar. Assume that all of the other conductors in the system have a much smaller resistance than the bar.