On Friday, November 27, 2015 at 7:00:48 AM UTC-8, Christopher Tidy wrote:

A few years back I built a Van de Graaff generator. It occurred to me at the time that it would be really cool to transport the electric charge using a liquid instead of a moving belt.

So today I was thinking: would it be possible to impart an electric charge to insulating oil ... and pump the oil up the column of a Van de Graaff generator to transport the charge? If it was all made from transparent acrylic, it would look really cool.

Would it work?

Maybe. Millikan's oil-drop experiment relied on charging oil, but he only got
a handfull of electrons on a droplet.

There are oil-miscible semiconductors, you could flood a bit of your oil tubing with
UV light and create photoconduction for a short period (long enough to
get charge diffusion). The problem, then, is that the charge will repel,
and lie mainly against the tubing walls, which isn't the flowing part of the
oil stream. It seems you'll get charged oil in motion with gravity streams
easier than in pipes.