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
Your figures seem to be optimistic. 216 KV is very high and should produce an arc in air of about 100 mm.
I think that 8 milliamps is probably going to be 8 microamps. How are you measuring this current?
Also, if your 216 v is pulsed DC rather than pure DC, then your wattage figure will be significantly lower, dependent on the mark-space ratio.
So the maximum voltage these machines make, not the voltage I made in a "does it even work" test, is determined by the distance between the plates on the disk/barrel.
In my case, from anode to neutralizer bar to cathode, the electricity would need to jump across 8 plate gaps.
Because of the distance between plates my machine will only short out internally at 208 KV on the current barrel and 216 KV on the new barrel, so that's the maximum voltage my machine can match to push electrons.
These can also be thought of like voltage matching current supplies to an extent because they will raise their output voltage until the the current flow in the circuit matches what the machine is trying to produce.
This is why they spark so far, stick these in an insulating gas like helium and they produce megavolts because you eliminate interplate sparking.
The amperage these machine produce is given by the formula C = 26.55uA x A x RPM (according to the engineering department at the federal university of RIo De Janeiro ) where A is the surface are in square meters that is used to transfer charge in a rotation.
In my case I have 10 mm by 170mm strips (18x180 on the new barrel) and there is 30 of them
So with that surface area the original barrel produces 1.37 uA per rotation.
Since I have that, I can just multiply by my set speed and tell you what amperage the machine will push at what RPM.
The voltage will climb until those amps get pushed out of the machine through the circuit. As long as I don't exceed the internal short circuit voltage.
So I can provide those milliamps at a maximum of that voltage.
In my case for the test yesterday morning, I had a 1 cm gap. In order to arc accross that, the machine needs to match the ionisation potential of the air which is 30 KV/cm.
So my machine matched the required voltage to make the spark, after which point, all of the produced current could flow and then the voltage stabilised because the current flow out of the machine matched the current production of the machine.
The voltage only rises when current production exceeds current draw.
In order to produce 210 KV like I want to, I'm going to need to either provide an extremely high impedance/resistive load or tune a spark gap.
But yesterday I spun at 1600 rpm and I made a continuous 1 cm spark and with my machines dimension and the engineering parameters, I made 63 watts.