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


Hi Chris,
If I were you, I'd post some of the questions raised over in
sci.physics and alt.sci.physics. They will have an answer about
oil and charge carrying capacity. And a whole lot more.

Mikek