So I stopped working on the wimshurst because I was running into some manufacturing and pulley relate roadblocks to do with the strength of plastic and 3d printng and I completely scrapped what I was making and put together a Cylindrical Verison of this Lebiez Machine
It functions the same from an end user perspective and it's quite powerful.
My last parts finished printing this morning so I spent the morning putting things together and getting ready to test. Everything was perfect and everything worked the way a I was hoping without capacitors attached.
I was able to create a sustained 30 KV Arc that was powerful enough to be visible in sunlight.
I was spinning the machine with a drill at around 1,600 RPM and I basically felt no resistance from the drill to my hand, like a bit, but feather resistance kind of thing.
Now there's math to prove the output. Pretty soon I'm going to check if I can spin it with an old low tourque 48 watt AC motor with burnt out bearing XD.
If that works, I have the mathematical theory and the physical unit that proves that unlimited free energy is real. It's easy and you can do it at home, almost for free.
Then I'm going to reprint my cylinder to use sheet metal instead of foil tape. The foil tape actually screwed me over and ruined my 18 hour print 250 gram barrel.
I only got 5 minutes of fun! The stupid foil tape started tearing up and the glue and tin mixed together and shorted out the entire f-ing barrel!
It's trashed, all of the crevices are full of glue and foil.
That being said, the machine worked and it was easy to spin, that's the important part.
EDIT: Just finished the design for the barrel that'll fit the sheet metal strip......it's going to take over 600 grams of PLA and it's going to take 2.5 days on my MK3S+ lol
As a bonus, because of the way that I'm making grooves that'll fit and hold the metal strips, the sruface area for each strip is close to double the tinfoil strips area. So double the current and there's a little more space between plates, so also going to get a little more peek voltage.
Based on these numbers and my dimenstions, thanks to the upgrade in the design, I'll be making over 4 milliamps at 1800 rpm. The design also has room for more electrodes to be placed on there, so once those are in place it'll be 8 milliamps at a max of ~216 KV with the current design. That'll be 1728 Watts at 1800 RPM on a 3d printed electrostatic generator that you can pick up and carry and transport inside of anything that fits a 10 inch by 24 inch package.
Photos, videos and 3D print files are coming after I make sure the new barrel doesn't explode at speed and I have it hooked up a motor and some experiments
That looks like a vandegraph generator, like we had in physics class.....
BTW, wouldn't it be nice if we could have some sort of generator hooked up to an exercise bike that would store energy in bateries and had electrical outlets to plug into?
These are like vandergraphs, except they are way, way more efficient. Van Der Graafs use belts and friction to make static with the tribo-electric effect.
They are inherrently unreliable and lossy because you can't avoid the fact that friction=heat and friction = wear and tear.
These are a little different. These charge capacitor plates in an environment that's friendly to being charged and then separates them and forces the voltage on the plates to rise in response, then stores that increased voltage in a capacitor or dissipate it in a circuit.
The way these things are set up, they kind of create a positive charge vortex on one side of the machine and a negative charge vortext on the other side. The vortexs continuously siphon electrons from the positive side to the negative side until something gives because the voltage got too high or you use some of the built charge to do something.
That's a great description. So it's really an electron concentrator, aggregating ambient electrons into a useful output, the same way a raincatcher traps ambient moisture and condenses it into a bucket. Except you're actively cycling the ambient charge environment to achieve a reliable output. Am I understanding it correctly?
The storage output and protection against overcharging will be important to make the device useful, once you get there without frying the components. I suppose you could line up multiple sparkers with gateways at each one in case of overflow. Wouldn't an overflow mechanism also help prevent the components from frying?
You are understanding how this works now. Yes, these machine can be thought of as electron concentrators, like a high pressure electron pump.
Now get this: the machine is easier to spin under load 😅.
When you don't have a load drawing current, the charge concentration starts to make back pressure that you can feel in the wheel, when you relieve the back pressure by providing a load, the machine spins easier.
So when you make one of these, you can spin it unloaded and find out the maximum physical resistance to turning by forcing the machine to short circuit.
This is why I know for a fact I have overunity, that maximum physical resistance is nothing.
Like I know it isn't litterally nothing, but I can't feel the difference when I spin the little 10 mm drive shaft with my fingers, I litterally can't feel the difference between it working with electrode on it vs it working without electrode on it.
After the glue messed up my machine I spun it with a recycled 48 watt fan motor from an old walmart house fan.
The drive shaft is all messed up and crooked and the bearings are shot, so I took the fan apart because it was shaking like pain mixer and I've had the motor lying around for a year. Any ways, if I held it at the right angle and let it vibrate my hand a bit I could line it up right with a printed fitting to spin the machine.
It did, at first it was a little slow, then when I lined everything up perfect and the speed picked up, the vibrations became easier to hold and I was able to keep the tip of the output shafter steadier to drive shaft and I must have spun the barrel at like twice the speed the drill made it go.
I did that after my barrel got ruined just to see if the motor could spin it.
If it can spin it with the electrodes in place, even if the barrel is shorted, that means it can spin it when the barrel is not shorted to me because I cannot feel the difference between working and not working in terms of resistance to spinning.
The new barrel is even better, the plates stick out of the surface of the barrel by a bit, so the electrodes don't need to contact the barrel in between plates, it'll be even easier to spin.
That makes sense about the load, once I think about it like a pump. (I've studied lots of pumps. In this case it seems like it's all about the electrical equivalent to check valves, flow impediment, and product containment. Since no material is totally non-porous to electrons, it's important to channel the output safely.)
Be sure to manage the overflow instead of trying to contain it, by providing excess discharge outlets. I'm not aware of any measurements or rule-of-thumb guidelines on how much static electricity is ambient at any given time. It's like you are making a water wheel or hydro turbine, but can't know how powerful the river is because it's invisible. Stay safe!
I'm eager to hear about the next build. (And for every home to have its own generator to get rid of all those pesky overhead lines. One step at a time...)
Like Fred Flintstone’s with the dino running it like hamsters on a wheel? Or the feet to start the car?
“Future Proves Past”...😂
Seriously, though, (edit) Kekistani_prince, excellent achievement! Well done.
Like on Gilligan's Island?