Tinselkoala's high voltage "Mendicno Homopolar".

[synchro1]

Youtube:

"TinselKoala . 

"I'm wondering about eddy currents too. I'm going to try to get a homopolar generator segment going on this thing next." Here to help:


Tinselkoala is spinning a magnetic rotor with over 6kv of high voltage current:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrl4_wREFJ8


The "Mendicino" levitating platform is very well suited for a Faraday generator. The pencil point contact is a natural output electrode. An axial polarized magnet disk attached to a larger diameter copper disk and a copper axel cap sleeve that makes contact with the interior hole of the copper disk. Contact brushes for the outside rim of the larger diameter copper disk, complete the generator.

The  real advantage is, the generator disk magnet can double as a levitator on the contact point end. Anticipate high amperage low voltage "Lenz Free" output. Huge contrast to the very high voltage input. COP should be awesome. The amazing feature of Faraday's generator is that the field remains stationary even though the magnet's spinning!

TK's innovative breakthrough is a major achievement. No one has ever powered a motor with static electricity before. The contrast between power voltage and output amperage couldn't be more extremely stark in this kind of  "TK Faraday Levitating Homopolar Motor Generator" setup! A non magnetic conducting ball bearing collar around the outside of the copper disk may reduce brush fricion on the disk edge if substituted for contact. Positioning a tiny nonmagnetic conducting precision bearing at the axel contact point would increase the electrode surface area and improve the connection. This tiny bearing can attach to the axel end, with an electrode wire extending, and the bearing can self adjust along with the axel as the pencil point does.

[TinselKoala]

Now, now... don't go getting all excited. Yet.

First, electrostatically powered motors are nothing new. I've shown both a corona/charge motor similar to this one but using an actual bearing and a horizontal rotor, and a classic Franklin-style motor with an enhancement of my own, both running on the output of the Moore's Dirod electrostatic generator, some years ago.  And for a real blast, I designed and built and demonstrated an electrostatically-powered Tesla Turbine/motor, which needs a bit more power to spin, so I run it from the output of one of my Bonetti machines.

Second, I stuck a big fender washer to the ring magnet on the eraser end of the motor in the video above. Now that there is a conductor "cutting" magnetic field lines, there is eddy current generation in the big washer and so this puts a drag on the system and the maximum RPM goes down, to about 2400 RPM. I can get a detectable homopolar voltage by contacting the washer in the right place, but since the radius of the washer is small and the ring magnets only weak ceramic ones, the voltage is tiny, on the order of tens of milliVolts, and of course this is into a very high impedance load as well. I very much like the idea of using the axle point as the central contact for a Faraday dynamo, but when I put the large washer on the pointed end of the motor the eddy and mechanical drag was so great that I could only get a few hundred RPM out of it. This washer is magnetic though. If I can find a copper washer or make a copper plate that will probably work a lot better.

Third... the current at 6.4 kV to power this motor is very small, the power supply is essentially seeing an open circuit at the load. I'm putting about 5 watts DC input to the HVPS but this translates to much less at the rotor because of the low corona current (high impedance output load.) 5 Watts is basically the quiescent draw of that power supply, no load on its output. You could say that this motor "runs on voltage" because it is the electric field of the charges that pulls the rotor around, not an electromagnetic interaction (caused by current) like normal motors. There is of course some current flowing in this motor but it's small.

Finally...for now... thanks for posting a link to my video! Enjoy, contemplate, discuss.

[TinselKoala]

FWIW, here are a couple of shots.

First there is a 30 second time exposure at ISO1600, showing the small amount of corona from the electrodes and a patch on the disk edge itself. This is at around 4500RPM.

Next, a current determination using the moving-coil Hickok meter. I read this at about 35 microamps or so. This is at about 1200 RPM, and the current was about 10 uA with the stopped rotor and gradually increases with RPM.

The max output of the supply is 1200 uA; this is the same supply that I used for the TEA uv laser, where it's putting out its full rated current. Here we are seeing just a few tens of microamps.
So that means the power input to the rotor is probably between 150 and 250 milliWatts; a lot of that must be wasted somehow because I know that rotor isn't really dissipating that much.

ETA: I just determined that much of the loss is in the meter and the connecting cliplead. If I lose the meter and use the direct hookup the motor runs much faster. So at best we have an upper limit in the 250 mW figure. I don't know if I can get any more accurate current measurement... no way am I hooking this thing to an oscilloscope.

[Pirate88179]

TK:

That corona photo is very cool.  I am enjoying this line of experimentation that you are doing here.  I have nothing to add but now that I have posted, I can follow this work.

Keep it up.

Bill

[conradelektro]

More than 10 years ago I experimented with electrostatic motors.

My best result was a plastic disk (two CD-ROMs glued together with their conducting side, so that only the pure plastic sides where on the outside) with two blade-shaped electrodes on each side. One blade positive and one blade negative.

I tried many blade configuration, the one shown on the photos was the best. The copper blades are not touching the disk, they are about 2 mm above the disk.

This electrostatic motor reached 2800 rpm (bad bearings) with the HV from a colour monitor, about 36 KV pulsing DC. Do not do this, it is very dangerous.

See the attached photos.

I always wanted to do this with magnet bearings, but I never found the time and the will to really go about it. I also was afraid that one day I will be bitten by the 36 KV from the colour monitor.

Here a video (not from me) which explains this Poggendorf electrostatic motor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raqL-txPYFE . Usually one uses a row of fine needles, but I was a fan of the "blades", because blades were much simpler to build than a row of needles.

Here an other video (also not from me) showing a similar motor, also with blades: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zKrphJmHnQ

Greetings, Conrad