Kelvin's Water Dropper Thunderstorm - without drops?

[antijon]

I see you're right about the distance from the pails, which is why for a device like a van de graaff to work properly, the sphere must enclose the entire upper brush/roller assembly.

As for shorting, I don't know man. I'm still trying to figure out how the water ions are going to charge the plates without some type of electrolysis happening.

[LeoFreeman]

Electrolysis would be good  if we don't have to supply any power!
More messy than getting pure electricity, but useful nevertheless.

I was thinking about using an acid-base indicator to visually observe any changes in the ionic makeup of the water,\
would you believe, it's very practical: https://www.exploratorium.edu/snacks/indicating-electrolysis?media=7376

[TinselKoala]

Water serves as the charge carrier in Kelvin's generator, but you probably aren't going to see any significant degree of ionization with ordinary acid-base indicators. Consider that one mole of water, 18 grams, contains 6.022 x 10²³ water molecules, and one Coulomb of charge is equivalent to the charge on 6.24 x 10¹⁸ electrons. A Coulomb of charge is a huge amount of charge. Each water drop in a properly working Kelvin generator only carries a tiny fraction of a Coulomb, meaning that a very small number of ions will exist in the water. The extreme strength of the electrostatic force due to the E-field of this small number of ions allows influence machines like the Kelvin generator to operate, but there are better ways to generate, or rather separate, large quantities of charge using other types of influence machines. In fact, you could probably make a more efficient generator using the Kelvin layout but instead of water, use dust particles or even tiny plastic spheres. Tesla, IIRC, designed an influence machine that used dust particles as the charge carriers. It was similar to a VDG machine but instead of a belt, blowers circulated dust through a closed loop of piping.

[LeoFreeman]

 Water is nowhere near as efficient a charge carrier as bigger particles, such as dust, as you mentioned; but 
it is cheap (well, it used to be cheap  ) and the influence machines can potentially be scaled up enormously.

This brings me to a question that has been bugging me for a while now:  If it is true (?)  that water gets (- at least some of -) its
energy for self-dissociation from the Quantum Vacuum Fluctuations, 
then what happens to that energy when it is re-emitted and the H₃O⁺ / OH^- ions go back to ground state again? 
Why doesn't water spontaneously boil away due to all  that build-up of energy?

I remember Tom Bearden mentioning something similar to that in one of his videos on Zero Point Energy; I can't find it again, but he said
something like it is a mystery as to why certain acid-base neutralization reactions don't give off heat energy, or something like that.

[DavidWolff]

I can confirm this experiment generates free static electricity, from water droplets into a lover bucket, it can also give you a nasty shock, but like all things you need to get the water to the top, but before you say I know a way of doing that for free each side has to be insulated from each other , think you can do it ? for so little gain ?

D Wolff