1975 Rain Fuel - Power Directly From Rain - omnibus

foreign beating down on the roof and it's causing Havoc they're bringing trees down on the road so people can't get around the power lines down telephone lines are out it really makes you think about how you can generate your own electricity at home unfortunately there are just a limited number of options I mean you could buy yourself a generator a diesel petrol generator because you can't drive to the petrol station is as much use as a chocolate teapot to you you could set up your own wind you can have some solar if you live by the Sea we've got wave power but that's pretty much it and of course with all this rain coming down it makes you think well if only we could extract the power from the rain because rain carries a charge as it comes down as a water droplet there is a charge on it and if that charge could be collected wouldn't it be awesome now there are efforts to collect rain water and use that to drive a generator of some kind equipments did it he used his roof and his gutters and he put it down the downside uh damp spout and forced it over a Pelton wheel and generated from that but there is oh there are other methods of generating from rain and now they've been a bit embarrassingly low in terms of their ability to generate an amount of electricity because they rely on something called triboelectricity driver electricity is that electricity you get by rubbing two surfaces together some materials have a propensity for giving up electrons some materials have been propensity for taking those electrons on board so they will get a plus and a minus charge as you run together the famous one is a glass and cats fur if you get a piece of glass and you get a cast iron rub it you will create a charge of static electric charge that's responsible for those shops that you get sometimes when you touch a metal cupboard or a metal bed when you've been walking on some nylon carpets it's the thing that you rub a balloon on your jumper you can stick it to a wall or you can make your hair stand dependent on end that's tribal electricity and it's present in just about everything now in order for that chance to stay then it needs to be an insulator a bit of metal a charge goes away almost immediately and you can't notice it but it still happens it's just the charge grounds very quickly tribal electricity is the basis is an awful lot of Nana generation schemes and energy Scavenging schemes including Rainwater now it's been the case but as I say that amount of energy that could be collected has been embarrassingly small until recently there's been some work that's come out of the University of Hong Kong what they've done is essentially make a whole gang of little capacitors and when the rainwater hits that capacitor it generates a huge amount of surprising amount and I reckon it's about 50 watts per square meter when you think of solar panel produces 150 watts a square meter that's pretty awesome I mean solar panels will be rented at something like a kilowatt per square meter but that's the rating it's not what they produce they actually produce around about 150 watts and because if you live in a rainy country like England or Oregon or South Island New Zealand you get far more rain than you do be Sunshine so your solar panels are producing very little if we could create a rain panel that's producing 50 watts per square meter we have a real alternative now the way these things are made up is there is a layer of conductor and what's used is Indian tin oxide and on top of that a layer of insulator which is polytetrafluorethylene polytetrafluorethylene is this stuff it's Plummer's tape it's the same stuff that you find on your frying pan this is PTFE tape and it's used for plumbing blood water and gas so that material is on top of a conductor and then there's a tiny collector when the rainwater hits it it forms a capacitor where the rain water with its charges one side of the capacitor and the Onkyo is the other side when the rain water opens up and touches the electrode in the PTFE side are current flows now it's not an embarrassing amount of current it's a huge amount of current and in the demonstration four of these little things can actually light I think it's up to 200 LEDs and you can see the LEDs flashing off and on as the water drips over them which is just astonishing now of course with something like that aren't you just tempted to see if you can do a replication I mean in my mind what you would do is get a piece of aluminum put some PTFE on it put a little electrode on the PTFE and take it out into the Wren we can make a homemade version astonishingly easily kitchen foil plumber's tag all we've got to do is stick some kitchen foil onto a plastic background and then some plumber's tip on top of it so that's exactly what we're going to do so there's a nice bit of plastic with some kitchen Force stuck on with double-sided tape I've got a bit of insulation tape here it's uh gaffer tape and that's so we can hold it without actually making electrical contact that's a bit of plumber's tape which is PTFE and again some double-sided tape stuck on it some aluminum tape this stuff is um from Heating and ventilation it's used as a seal and that's it so I put it in the stand which is why we put that insulator on and here it is just above the spread the towel to catch any water drops because I'm going to drop water on it this is just ordinary tap water which is what they use in the University but in tap water rainwater and sea water and they found that tap water and rainwater worked better than sea water because remember this is about the charge that's actually in the Raindrop as it falls so it's got nothing to do with the salts in the sea water it's got nothing to do with the movement of the rain water it's got to do with the charge in the rain water and how that charge is transferred on this this is basically a capacitor so we're going to drip some tap water on it I've got the usual setup here with my phone on the meter and let's have a look at the meter when the water droplet rolls over the capacitive contacts because that's what you're interested in how it rolls over it look at that when we get it rolling over we get this huge amount of energy I mean 100 millivolts may not seem like a huge amount to you but remember this is just a couple of strips of alley on some PTFE I think it's awesome I really do now that is just with the charge have a look at this this has four of them lighting 200 LEDs so here's a close-up and this is when the water rolls over the contacts watch what happens to the voltage see that okay so it's a method that works it works really well but what excites me about it what interests me about it is remember it's made from Kitchen foil and plumber's tape so this is something you could actually make yourself when people make their own homemade solar cells they're always a bit weedy because you use copper oxide and if you want to get a decent solar cell well you've got to buy one but it seems that this is something we could make something we can make from normal store ingredients that has 50 watts per square meter and that is just awesome because you could actually go out and do this now I understand that I'm really just demonstrating how to make a single cell and how simple that cell is but to reproduce this on a larger scale it would be lots and lots of small cells that's all you're actually wanting to do you're not wanting to build a massive cell lots of little small ones put them on the panel and the panel can clearly be anything any lump of plastic or wood or glass or whatever obviously non-conductive and you're going to have yourself a um electrostatic tribal electric rainwater generator remember has got nothing to do with the movement of the water or the salt content it's the electrical charge the water already has in it that you're collecting it's the same thing that makes lightning you basically collecting lightning which I think is just amazing now there are lots of things as well for experimenters so if you wanted to make this you could just go out and make it but there's obviously a lot of experimentation that could be done with this there are questions that need answering so is it the movement that's interesting is that what's generating in which case can we just dip this in a stream could we put it in a wheel Arrangement could we flow water past it so many questions that need answering with an arrangement like this and the arrangement stupidly simple to make kitchen full plumbers tape pair of scissors and a bit of patience and you're off now all I've done here which is version two same bit of plastic same bit of aluminum but now it's painted with our conductive ink krex painted it with his own conductive ink if you want to make a conductive ink then I've done a really good video on how to go about doing that and it's video number 1381 if you want to find these videos instantly just go to the channel and type in the number on the search bar it'll just pop straight up so if you want to make your own ink follow videos 1381 if you want to buy any other ink go out and buy another ink but it works beautifully with a conductor do you think so to my bit of plastic put my bit of aluminum on it painted it with our ink now they're never going to worry a little bit this is going to go in the rain and I was wondering if the rain water would actually eventually just wash the ink away or as I've been mentioned uh corrode the aluminum so what I did then really simple there's some art down outdoor varnish it's a polyurethane varnish leaves a polyurethane coat all I did with this was dip it in let it drip dry when it was dry of course it's got a fine polyurethane coat over the top of the conductive varnish uh conductive ink so if you make your own conducted ink you can make it water-based just dip it in that and you'll have a waterproof surface now of course polyurethane is an insulator and as we know this is basically a capacitor so it now has a layer of insulation on it so it no longer needs the PTFE so the PTFE is gone so remember this is the original with its strip of plumber tape there this hasn't this is a layer of aluminum layer of our ink dipped in the varnish and then the electrodes stuck straight on the top I'm gonna do now obviously is try it so I've got a little Bowl underneath here clamp holding in place and I've got a dropper funnel right there so I can turn it on and get a drop of water on it and of course we've got our meter connected so we can connect our meter drop some water on it and see what happens there we go too simple but huge improvements one paint your aluminum with some conductive ink too dip it in some polyurethane varnish then you can get rid of your PTFE and you get a huge Improvement on the output okay it works as a range generative what about if you made it into a wheel and it would dip in and out of the water now I tried leaving it in the water and it doesn't work it must move through the water or the water must move over it I mean it's frames are reference so it doesn't really matter which one moves if water has to be moving over the surface so people said what about a wheel so I thought it was brilliant so of course what I'm holding here is a wheel now it's nothing more than eight of our little REM wand generators so I've made exactly the same way there is a generator it's a piece of plastic covered in alley painted with our ink and then varnished and then obviously I've stuck it to a wheel now in order to get this to work I need to connect them to connect them means taking some kind of connection from the edge of the aluminum here and feeding it out so that it doesn't actually interfere and I'm using a bit of wire now it's 10 simple just take a bit of wire and nip off quite a large end of it this is quite a fine stranded wire so it makes a brush actually and if you feed that brush through the hole and then press it against here and tape it down you have a great connection the resistance of this connection is apparent point zero zero two of an OHM so it's a good connection and it is literally just a push connection with a bit of tape on it so we feed the wire through the hole that I've made and then we can make a nice connection on the other side when we've assembled everything at some distance press it press it there a couple of bits of tape hair Presto so let's finish off those and there it is finished so we've remembered taped it to the back here fed it through this disc butter glue and then we've got our contact points that we can join together and of course I put the other disc on now what we need to do is to put the connection on here the electrode on here rather and so that we need a thin strip of aluminum that we run there along there and then onto here which would be where that connection point is and we're going to use ducting aluminum to do so there it is with its electrodes attached running up here and running to there so now we'll give it a quick test to make sure that one of these works so I've just connected up this one alone and we'll pop that on there and dip it in and out and see if we get a result oh look [Laughter] oh look okay I 0.6 of a volt that's awesome so the next job obviously is to get this into a wheel that will rotate so throw the axle all I've done is take some eight millimeter copper pipe and glue them onto a bit of wood because there'll be slip Rings whatsoever insulated here and then we have the conductor there connect all those wires to split rings and then obviously lay a brush on each of those and that's how we're going to collect from it Okay so we've got it set up now obviously I haven't done this in a particular refined way because we're testing the wheel Luke's just going to push the insulated end and of course that's going to bring the wheel through this still water this Stillwater is just tap water obviously I've got the PIP set up and we're going to be reading the voltage now this is connected in parallel and it's connected in parallel because each wheel dips in by itself and we're going to get the the voltage rule with the same across the whole wheel and the amps will be the same across the whole wheel hey voila so we're going to record a pip we're going to give it a bit of a spin see what we get and I'm the brushes okay Matt ready to rock ready to rock a little bit faster there you go a little bit slower okay okay thank you mate okay so we got about 0.4.5 of a volt you can see there's still a voltage on it and that's because it's a capacitor so uh it won't do anything until we discharge it and it'll discharge itself slowly but there we go it actually works as a wheel so as a proof of concept put it in a wheel Arrangement Works a treat actually now we did get this up to 0.6 so it is a capacitor so those voltage readings are staying there means that there is a real power on this thing which is kind of cool hey um but we obviously need to improve that a bit I mean actual brushes on the slip Rings would do really well for that but a rotating version does in fact work so if you took this and put it into a stream obviously the stream would be the thing that rotates it and so Luke would be a stream so to speak anyway I hope you enjoyed this development of it I certainly found it interesting that we'd be able to make a water wheel where the water wheel would directly generate energy as opposed to as having to strap a generator onto it and that does raise questions about the talk and whether we need torque in a water wheel to generate anything of that significant using this capacitive behavior of the conductive ink anyway I hope you enjoyed the video hope you enjoyed the series so far thank you very much for watching and if you are experimenting with this then please do share because it would be fantastic for us all to be able to improve This Together anyway thank you very much for watching

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 22,552

Keywords: ran, power, fuel, generation, robert, fwg, tnt

Id: WYUwBGQS5_E

Length: 18min 43sec (1123 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 02 2023