13 November
2006

Wimshurst machine

Natasha is working on a Wimshurst machine for a science fair project. I had one as a child myself and apparently talked about it enough for her to somehow remember it fondly. This is a machine for generating static electricity that can be manually powered. With luck it can generate substantial sparks, but I have read that it took some people many weeks of tuning and she has about 10 days to complete and tune her assembly.

Although Krys and I each wanted to suggest some design ideas, she insisted on inventing a design of her own without really having any input from us. In many ways this was kind of frustrating, but she came up with a very neat design based on plumbing supplies, and is probably more proud of it this way. It's far from finished but the partly-assembled device on the kitchen table, even though it's held together only with masking tape, can already generate a tiny bit of voltage.

Posted by dudek at November 13 21:10 | Read (3) or Leave a comment | permalink link to this entry |

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Comments

Re: Wimshurst machine

The machine was completed Jan 27th and a blog entry about it will follow. It is manually operated, but I think she is still planning to make it motor driven. The biggest problem was corona discharge (lost electrons) from sharp edges on various metal parts.

Posted by: GD at January 28,2007 17:43

Re: Wimshurst machine

This is more on this project coming is both a later blog posting (due mid-February) and a web page documenting the project. It appears it was able to generate a voltage of about between 30 kV and 40 kV, based on the length of the sparks she got and the breakdown voltage of dry air, and the radius of the terminal electrodes.

Posted by: GD at February 11,2007 18:29

More details on the Wimshurst machine

http://www.dudek.org/Wimshurst

Posted by: dudek at August 12,2008 01:10

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