Stepping Down a Wimshurst

[Steven Dufresne]

     What if we put an ammeter around the spark gap.  There seems to be considerable current flow in a spark gap and the ammeter is designed to convert current flow into voltage without intrusion into the loop circuit.  Least the old ones that you didnt have to put a battery in.  Just an annular ring of laminated steel and carbon.

Are you sure you're not thinking of measuring voltage with an analog moving coil meter when you say "the ammeter is designed to convert current flow into voltage without intrusion"? My voltmeter has a 10megaohm resistance. Putting this in parallel with the spark gap would cause it to steal proportionally less current. But ammeters are typically only tens to hundreds of ohms, depending on what scale you have them on. The lower the current scale, the higher the resistance. (all this is moot if you have some sort of analog ammeter that's different)

So putting an ammeter in parallel with the spark gap would be shorting out the Leyden jars and the spark gap with a lowish resistance alternate path from one collector to the other collector. Plus, if voltage does build up then when the arc occurs it will cause a sudden rush of current through the ammeter and potentially damage it.

However, if all you care about is grabbing the current in realtime (i.e. with no voltage buildup) that's going from one collector to the other, then widen the spark gap so that it's irrelevant, remove the Leyden jars and just put your ammeter where the spark gap was.
-Steve
http://rimstar.org   http://wsminfo.org

[gauschor]

Hmmm ok, I give in, it's really pointless to power a LED purely by an electrostatic machine It works with the small neon stick though. *Sigh*... how did Baumann created that much power out of it. Peter Lindemann thinks that Baumann caught "cold electricity" using metal grids and that about 20 of these grids with cylindrical form were put into the large tubes on the left and right side. If that is true it would mean that in the center of all these cylinder grids would be a small spark gap. The grid should collect the large amounts of Radiant energy (like in Edwin Gray device). But then why is the big coil around it? Is that the transformer for the much larger current he receives from the grid and uses it to transform it down? Baumann could have put the "collecting grid cylinders" into the large transformer coil simply because of space management...
And if it were that way, how did he manage to create/receive Radiant energy from it? A spark gap only won't be enough for that, or would it? Tesla said he needed the spark to be less than 100 µseconds in duration to achive that effect...If the Testatika disc has 60 segments and makes only 1 full loop per second, it is only a frequency of 60 Hertz, which would be like bulbs in common households. So he has 60 discharges per second on a small sparkgap. But then... isn't the duration of the sparks longer than 100 µseconds? So how would he get radiant energy? Questions over questions... and no answers

Anyone already tried to do a simple transform of the high voltage of a Wimshurst into low voltage/larger current? E.g. if I make a 5mm distance in the sparkgap (guessing 1 kV/mm), and want 12 Volts I need to do:

U1/U2 = N1/N2 ... let's say I use 2000 Windings on the primary:
5000/12 = 2000/x => 5000x = 24000 => x = 24000/5000 =~ 5 Windings on the secondary site. Is it even worth to try it out?, because I am sure someone must have done it already with a more or less useful result :s would be nice to hear about that.

[sparks]

   I was talking about a clampon ammeter that is a common tool for electricians.  It measures the change in the magnetic field about a current carrying conductor.  It only works if the current has some kind of flux density change.  DC ripple or ac.   The currents in the spark gap can easily get to thousands of amperes if a capactor spark gap and dead short are used. 

[mscoffman]

I was talking about a clampon ammeter that is a common tool for electricians.  It measures the change in the magnetic field about a current carrying conductor. 

@sparks

Yes...that is correct. The ampere probe becomes a
transformer with the external (user) wire becoming
the single (partial) primary turn. Transformers work with
AC only but are non-contact primary to secondary.

:S:MarkSCoffman

[mscoffman]

Yeah I've heard stories where people with a coil, connected to nothing,
get shocked by it, repeatedly, over and over.  It is getting inducted by
probably radio waves and the lines in their shop.  And indeed could be
used as an inducted collector of no-pay electricity, from the wires in
your wall, without "stealing" their juice at all, regardless of what their
pie hole tries to flap at you.

However you should probably be more concerned with the fact that your
body is absorbing these magnetic waves from the wall at 60mhz all day
long, and this is proven to be bad for you many ways, such studies are
suppressed of course.

@foggy-notion;

There is a subtle difference between radio EMF waves and magnetic waves.
Radio waves are emitted by the user into freespace and therefore generally
represent lost energy. (Unless the user expects an r^2 diminished echo of some
type). So would be amenable to legal interception.

Pure magnetic field waves on the other hand, link the primary and the secondary windings.
Secondary load is necessary to make the primary conduct. In other the primary user
expects a magnetic echo and pays if the energy is intercepted by something or anything.
So an efficient transformer does "steal" power from it's primary winding.

---

The body does not intercept either type of energy efficiently except at
certain frequencies, but in any case excessive exposure probably is undesirable.

:S:MarkSCoffman