On 11/27/2015 9:00 AM, Christopher Tidy wrote:
Hi folks,

This is a question for people with electrical knowledge, especially in the field of electrostatics. It's also spontaneous. I'm not sure if I'm going to build anything yet.

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. I thought of pumping bubbles of electrically charged air into a column of oil and allowing them to rise under gravity. But then I did a few calculations and came to the conclusion that you could barely generate enough current from such a system to build a good generator, so I never built it.

This week I acquired one of these chemical pumps when a laboratory was being cleared out (in the 0.25 kW size):
http://www.schmitt-pumpen.de/en/prod...mp-series.html

So today I was thinking: would it be possible to impart an electric charge to insulating oil (no bubbles this time) 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? How could the oil be charged? Perhaps by pumping it through a stainless gauze connected to a high voltage power supply, I was thinking.

Anyone know? For now, it's just a train of thought. But it's interesting...

All the best,

Chris


About 20 years ago I worked with a physicist, he thought this might
work. So as his tech I proceeded to build a Van de Graaff with oil as
the medium to move the charge, We used a sump pump to pump the oil.
It didn't work on the first try, and there was no attempt to alter
it to make it work. I don't know if he figured out a flaw in the idea,
or, if we decided we needed to go back to money making work. I was
disappointed, it was just dropped with no further thought.
We did use a high voltage power supply as you suggest above.
Mikek