Hi, I like to make a Van De Graaff machine to make super high voltages
This machine is invented by Robert J. Van De Graaff and works based on Triboelectric Effect
Which is basically if two certain different material rub against each other
They become electrically charged one of the two materials
Pulls electrons from the other one and becomes negative leaving the other one positive
Like when I rub towel against PVC pipe in my previous video
In Van de Graaff machine, there is a belt that rotates very fast and constantly rubs against some rod and becomes charged
My belt is one of those workout elastic bands
**Mehdi doing workout**
The PVC pipe turns negative and the belt turns positive
If I rotate the belt like this, the rubbing action will charge the belt and the pipe
This is a Leyden jar I made which is basically a capacitor as I explained in my previous video
I taped a wire to the center contact with its strands poking out like that
And I also taped a bunch of strands to the outer contact of the capacitor
Now if I move the belt like this beside these wires it simply charges the capacitor
See, when the neutral belt passes over the PVC pipe
It leaves its electron on the PVC and turns
positive going down. The electrons on the PVC pipe are picked up by this wire and charged the center of the capacitor negative which repels
The electrons on the outer surface of the bottle and when I turn the belt the positive charges on the belt pick up those electrons
coming from the outer surface and the belt becomes neutral and the outer surface of the capacitor becomes positive and the cycle continues
Maybe you hear the charges going into the capacitor
And if I do this multiple times
And try to discharge the capacitor
There it was charged and this is pretty much how Van de Graaff machine works
Let's make one
And another school wins the tool giveaway and there is another Keysight school giveaway at the end of the video
I bought a bunch of PVC pipes and fittings to put this together
Making the rotating part of the machine was a bit tricky
See, I had the DC motor from my old drill and I took some parts from it to make this section and the DC motor
Directly couples here and the belt goes around it and turns. Cuts the excess width of the belt
Damn it. Why is it so hard to cut?
finally
Now I cut the stationary part of the PVC from a thicker pipe
Now I put that piece in the belt and stretch the belt a little bit and attach it around here
**BLEEP**
I shouldn't have glued it, see, the stupid glue settles quick and I don't have time to make it straight. Damn it
A bit shorter, well, it's okay. I'll glue it afterwards
So here's what I've made so far
My belt goes around that fixed PVC pipe on top
Which is held by a piece of wood and some screws and the roller on the bottom
and if I turn the roller it turns I didn't make the belt too tight either because I was afraid that the friction between the
Belt and the top fixed PVC might hurt them in the long run now
I want to see if I can charge my Leyden jar with it
So I'm gonna place the jar beside it like this and turn the belt
Also I have a wire from the outer surface beside the center contact with a gap
So if it is charged enough there should be an arc between them
Okay, let's do it
It does get charged
There you go, but I think with this set up is only charging to a limited voltage, so let's just continue building the whole Van de Graaff
Now that my tower is almost done I was thinking of using aluminum foil to create those charge pick up brushes
But then I realize something these aluminum foil cutting sharp edges should make the best brush
so I'm gonna cut this I'll cut these and glue them on some ice cream sticks for support and when you glue this on the
piece of wood make sure that these sharp edges are on the
Inside of the wood edge so that they won't touch any moving parts and scratch them
then we can drill a hole in these brushes, past seven wire through the hole and tighten it
And even solder the wire so it won't come out later something like this
Aagh, the more I'm running this belt the more it's developing a problem
See, the PVC is getting darker and it's covered with some sort of
Brownish goo that I can't clean up, But the goo is kind of sticky and results in the belt not being able to
rotate freely
and I have to change this belt I'm
Thinking if I could change if it's like a towel or a fabric it would be nice
I just saw a video from DIY. Tryin who made a Van de Graaff machine using pantyhose as belt
That sounds like a good idea. Let's give it a try. Aagh, where does she keep her pantyhoses?
I made this too permanent. I don't want to cut the belt
There
Now I will just do some pantyhose fitting
I also put the pantyhose around the bottom roller to like the guy did in his video. It has a few benefits
It increases the friction and prevents the belt to be torn apart by the sharp edges and things
The belt was shifting when rotating so I just glued a bump on the side to stop it from shifting
It should be good now. Let's see
There you go, but the real question is can it make static electricity?
Oh, there we go
Very good. Had to make a special brush for the topside roller. So here's how I did it for the bottom brush
I use the same thing I made from the aluminum foil box, but for the top side I had to make this
Special brush because you know, the belt is kind of bumpy and keeps jumping up and down
And I needed this brush to be flexible to accommodate that now for the top of the Van de Graaff machine
I have these two perfectly round IKEA bowls that you can find under the Van de Graaff section
I have to cut one of them open with my side grinder
**Electrocute rocking**
Aw, my ears
I have to get rid of all these sharp edges, otherwise the charges will run away from them
You know, I have this aluminum tape that's gonna help me cover the sharp edges of this thing
I'm gonna cover it with electric tape too for added insulation. Now to attach the two bowls
I'm gonna use a thin strip of aluminum tape and tape them together. This should get rid of the edge between the two balls to
There, and now I want to further cover it with electric tape
The last thing I want is for my precious charges to find a way and run away. There. Hopefully, it's good
You remember the piece of Bowl I cut using the aluminum tape
I will tape the top brush wire to my bowl
And then glue it on top right here
Why did I put that piece on top you ask, because now I can simply put this bowl right on top
And I'm done
I'm gonna run the motor from my power supply so that I can adjust the belt speed the way I want and
For the belt brush down there
I can connect the wire either to earth or my body or any other
conductor like this and these two will pick up
opposing charges and can arc to each other now the downside of this is that my entire room is now covered in dust and
garbage and **BLEEP**
Who's gonna clean all this? Now It may look like that
It took me five minutes to put this together because I'm wearing the same shirt
But the fact is that it took me a whole week to put this together
So you better like, share, subs... After running it for a while. My pantyhose got caught in a crack and was torn apart
Thanks a lot DIY trying
I have to go back to using my belt, it took a long time
Foohwow, I hope you appreciate my sacrifice for consistency what I'm trying to do is that instead of a fixed PVC pipe on the top
I'm making a rotating one by putting a pipe here and then this guy can just rotate around it
There will be much less rubbing between the PVC and the belt but I'm still hoping that it makes decent static electricity
Okay
Well, let's give it a try
It's actually better than the, ouch, pantyhose
Aagh!
This is shaving the shit out of my PVC pipe
This is driving me crazy. This took me six hours to make, it better work
Oh yeah!
It barely makes any static electricity now
This whole business of PVC pipe and pantyhose and rubber belt is quite temporary
I will just swich back to pantyhose and make sure it doesn't get cut and **BLEEP**
Now this is a pantyhose protector
And I'm gonna make a ground ball by taping two more IKEA bowls together and tape a wire to it and just mount it on
a PVC pipe
And here's our ground ball and finally it's done what time is it
Yeah, it took me around a week and a half
Well, it seems to be working fine just at the motor is a bit too noisy
And I have a feeling my rubber band was creating more static electricity and the pantyhose will probably wear out soon.
I don't know why I'm following that guy
recipe using a pantyhose. Why didn't I use some stronger fabric like
Like a legging, back to my wife's drawer
Here I found this legging with a much stronger fabric and stretchy too, good to make a belt. Let's see how much electricity it makes
Hey, not bad, you hear that
**BLEEP**
It's electricity is now like half the pantyhose
Well now it's quite a solid belt, but I think it's combination with the top roller PVC doesn't generate enough static electricity
I think I have to change it to something like acrylic glass or something
For now, I guess I'm stuck with the pantyhose
Now I'd like to try and remove the aluminum tape I put there, I'm thinking maybe it's sharp edges are making it worse
I think the aluminum cave had actually made it a bit better. Whatever. I'm done
You thought the video was finished, didn't you?
You can stop watching if you want but I'm gonna continue on till I get some large manly sparks, you know
some people like to buy large cars, I like my arcs large
I don't like how sharp these edges are even with the aluminum tape
I think a lot of charges might be running away from these so I'm gonna hot glue a piece of wire around these edges
The wire is to keep a round shape and then I'm gonna put aluminum tape around it nice and round
There I'm hoping that such curvy edge would be much better than the sharp edges before
well, it doesn't look like a bit stronger than before I
I guess the next step is to find a different material for the top roller to make more static electricity
Looking at the triboelectric series table
that lists a bunch of different material depending on how they like to get charged from all the way positives all the way negative
shows that cotton which is 95% of this belt doesn't like to get charged and the
combination of nylon pantyhose close to maximum positive and
PVC closed maximum negative is actually a very good combination and the size of arcs shown by DIY tryin proves that fact
So there must be something else you might design that's sucking away
the charges one thing I can think of is the huge **BLEEP* size of this hole I made at the bottom for experiment,
let me close it with some aluminum tape, although it doesn't quite get rid of the sharp edges
Yeah
Not any significant difference. I think I should have designed the whole small from the beginning
I'm gonna try one last idea before I completely give up to my smaller arcs
I'm gonna change this top PVC with a much thicker one to increase the friction surface area and hopefully make much more static electricity
And I'll probably increase the number of these brushes too to pick up as much charge as possible
And I had to buy 10 foot of these PVC pipe because I only needed three inches
So at the end of the video I'll give away
117 inches of... No, this is what I made. A bigger PVC pipe, a new brush here
This is the original brush and a new brush and this side
Agh...
Seems like with just original brush it was doing fine
Actually the PVC pipe made the biggest difference
Adding the new brushes didn't make much of a difference or in case of this one
It actually made it a bit worse, maybe because it's pointing outside the hole and the charges are running away
Yeah, I think the bigger PVC be the original brush is doing just fine
now for the last thing to try I covered all the sharp edges in multiple layers of
electric tape and see how far the arcs jump now
It jumps from all the way back here. Of course, we don't quite see them because they're long distance ones are weaker
but if I get close
They are pretty strong now
Yeah, I think this is a success. But wait! There is something else
I just added this brush right at the bottom of the belt and it
Significantly increases the chance of finding a mate. I mean picking up the all the charges
Look at this now, so much power. Ow, ow
I can really go back to making out full video now
one school called
Gymnasium Matija Mesić in Croatia wins one Keysight scope
Thanks to Keysight and a whole bunch of optical and magnetic lab components purchased by the support of my patrons at patreon.com
It's a gymnasium. Why do they need a scope?
Hmm, make sure to enter your school from the link in the description if it needs a tool and thanks to Keysight
I'll giveaway another one of these babies which is a hundred megahertz two channel scope with the built-in 20 megahertz
Function generator if you could see response analyzer
Frequency counter the digital voltmeter. To my patrons and viewers
So either become a patron to support my channel and thr school giveaways and for this or just enter the draw from the link in
the description. Good luck!
**UNIBROW DANCE**