The unit
What a maxel is
The word is short for magnetic pixel. A maxel is a single small region of the magnet whose poling points a chosen way — north out of the face, or south into it. One maxel on its own is just a tiny patch of magnet. The point is that you don’t place one; you place many.
Printed side by side across the face of a magnet, maxels make a pattern. The pattern is what carries the behaviour: how the magnet finds its mate, how hard it holds, how it lets go, whether it aligns itself or resists being turned. Two faces printed with matching patterns recognise each other and snap into one position; change the pattern and you change the rule.
This is the difference between a maxel and a pole on a plain magnet. An ordinary bar magnet has one north end and one south end, and that is the whole story. A maxel-printed magnet has a map of poled regions across a single face, and the map is the design.
The honest trade-off. A maxel pattern pulls the magnetic field in close to the face. That makes these magnets strong on contact and precise about where they mate — and weaker at a distance than a plain magnet of the same size. If you need reach across a gap, a plain magnet wins. If you need a clean, repeatable hold right at the surface, the pattern wins.
The process
How a pattern is printed
A maxel pattern is not cut, glued or assembled from little magnets. It is written into one ordinary magnet blank, region by region, by a magnetizing system.
Start with a standard magnet
Begin with an off-the-shelf permanent-magnet blank — the same kind of material used for ordinary magnets. At this stage it carries no pattern.
Lay out the maxels in software
The pattern is designed first on a computer: where each maxel sits, which way it is poled, and how the whole map should behave when it meets its mate.
Write the pattern in a fixture
The blank is held in a fixture and a magnetizing system writes the maxels into it, one poled region at a time, following the designed map. The magnet keeps the pattern permanently.
Measure what you made
The finished face is measured and compared with the design, so you can confirm the real magnet behaves the way the pattern said it would.
The exact field strengths, maxel sizes and machine settings belong to the people who build the magnetizing systems. What stays true everywhere is the shape of the work: design the map, write it into a blank, keep the result.
Design loop
From a pattern to a part
A maxel part is designed the way other precision parts are: you decide the behaviour you want before you make anything.
Choose the behaviour
Decide what the magnet should do — align, latch, hold at a set force, release when twisted — and lay out the maxel map that produces it.
Check it on screen
Model the pattern’s field and forces before any magnet is touched, so the map can be adjusted while changes are free.
Write it into a blank
Send the finished map to the magnetizing system and print the maxels into a real blank.
Measure the real part
Put the printed magnet on the bench and confirm the force, the alignment and the release match the design.
Resolution
Why placement is the whole game
Because the behaviour lives in the pattern, what the pattern can express comes down to how small each maxel is and how precisely it can be placed.
Smaller maxels and tighter placement mean finer patterns, and finer patterns mean more behaviours you can design into a single face — a sharper alignment, a specific hold force, a mate that only engages one way. Coarser placement gives you fewer, blunter options. The resolution of the print is the ceiling on what the magnet can be taught to do.
This is a different kind of control than you get by machining or assembling ordinary magnets. Shaping a plain magnet or stacking several together changes its size and its overall pull, but the magnet still has the simple two-pole behaviour of the material. Printing maxels changes the rule the face follows, without adding parts and without moving anything. The design happens in the pattern, not in the geometry you bolt together.
Questions
Common questions about maxels
What does “maxel” mean?
It is short for magnetic pixel. Like a pixel in an image, a maxel is one small element of a larger pattern; the pattern across the whole face is what you actually see and feel.
Is a maxel a separate little magnet glued onto the face?
No. A maxel is a poled region within one magnet. Nothing is stacked or bonded. The whole pattern lives in a single blank, written there by a magnetizing system.
What is a magnet blank made of?
A standard permanent-magnet material — the same families used for ordinary magnets. The maxel printing step is what makes a given blank special; it does not require an exotic material.
Does printing more maxels make the magnet stronger overall?
Not in the reach-across-a-gap sense. A maxel pattern concentrates the field near the face, so these magnets are strong and precise on contact but fall off faster with distance than a plain magnet of the same size. More and finer maxels buy you more behaviour, not more long-range pull.
Is the pattern permanent?
Yes. Once the maxels are written into the blank, the pattern stays put the way any permanent magnet holds its poling.
Who makes the systems that print maxels?
The magnetizing systems, the design software and the finished magnets come from Correlated Magnetics Research, whose product line is Polymagnet. They invented this way of making magnets.
Where printed maxels come from
Polymagnet makes the magnets — and the machines that print them
Everything on this page describes work done by Correlated Magnetics Research, the company that invented maxel printing. Their product line is called Polymagnet. They build the magnetizing systems that write the maxels, the software that designs the patterns, and the finished magnets themselves. If you want to design a pattern, buy a printed part or read the makers’ own technical material, go straight to the source.