How to Make Kelvin Water Dropper/Lord Kelvin's Thunderstorm

hi gang and my Kelvin water dropper and how it works video I demonstrated an earlier version of this one and explained how it works in this video I'll show you how to make your own mostly to give tips on the tricky parts the first thing you should work on is the water source at the top this will tell you how high the thing needs to be you can either go with tubes coming directly from a water tap or with the reservoir I'm using a reservoir in fact I have two of them because these parts down here need to be spaced apart they have to be spaced apart because they're electrically charged with opposite voltages and keeping them apart reduces losses if you have a wide enough container then you can use just the one container putting two holes in it for the water streams first thing to do with the reservoir is to make holes in them for the water to come out start with a small hole I'm tested if nothing comes out then try again with a bigger hole when you do get water coming out it will be following some distance as a solid stream and then break up into individual drops it's hard to tell that they're individual drops just using your eye but here I've increased the camera shutter speed and you can see that their drops to the eye it just looks like the solid stream has become turbulent but turbulent part are the drops you might find that the water is a solid stream for only an inch or so before becoming drops that's not good the inductors these two cans here need to have a solid stream entering them at the top and drops coming out from the bottom that can be hard to arrange if your solid stream lasts only an inch one way to increase the length of the solid stream is to make your hole larger so fine-tune your hole size until you get a decent stream length since I do have two reservoirs I had to electrically connect the water in them I already showed why in my how it works video so I won't go into that here I'm using a strip of aluminum foil just make sure that each end of the foil sits in the bottom of a reservoir I did manage to find this long plastic pastry container in a grocery store and made two holes in it that way I had just one reservoir didn't need the strip of aluminum foil next are these two inductors they're called inductors because they charge the water by induction I'm using two soup cans for them they have to be metal cylinders and they have to have both ends open so here I'm cutting the bottom off using hacksaw if you're using a soda can then you can use tin snips or maybe even strong scissors it's best if they don't have sharp edges but might have a sharp top edge and I still got decent results they don't have to have a large diameter if you look carefully here you'll see that to get the charging to work the stream a through you're very close to one edge so most of the can is doing nothing so while this works much smaller diameter would work too initially I supported my inductors in the air by hanging them from a piece of tape that was good to figure out where they should go but it also meant that they could move around a lot and I'd have to readjust them each time so once I knew where I wanted the inductors I measured and marked some wood for supports cut it drilled holes for screws and put them in then I mark the shelf drill holes in the shelf to then attach the wood to the shelf with help of some rubber bands i lastly attach the adductors securely to the wood result was inductors that would stay put just don't let the wood get wet otherwise it'll start conducting electricity if you have plastic then use that instead don't use metal to support them since that will short things out even better than what would the containers on the table here are called receivers you need two of them and they have to be metal if you're going to connect wires to them this should be pretty wide since when it's working the water will be spraying pretty widely many metal food cans have an insulating coating inside them like these ones here that's the case then scrape off some of that coating at the bottom so the water can pass its charge to the outside of the can just be warned one reason for the coating may be because the inside will rust in a few hours from contact with the water if that happens then you'll frequently have to scrape it again since the rust will interfere with the movement of the charge one thing that helps is if you make a rough spring out of bare wire stick the spring end down into the can and wedge the top end against the inside of the metal lip that will electrically connect the water to the metal lip and the outside of the can of course you can avoid all these problems by using a can that doesn't have an insulating coating like some paint cans but not this one it has a coating inside the can made of stainless steel would be best since it doesn't rust now to connect it all together the left inductor should be electrically connected to the right receiver and the right inductor should be connected to the left receiver connect them with whatever types of wire and connection method you have here I'm using wires with alligator clips on the ends just keep in mind that you'll have to empty the receivers once they get full so permanently attached wires could make this difficult the important thing is to keep the two wires apart from each other it's best if you keep them around as short as they need to be so that they don't droop and touch things that will interfere with them electrically and lastly the spark gap connect wires to the receivers and extend the other ends that they come close together the millimeter or so to start with that end is a spark gap the gap in the air when the spark will happen around are the parts of the spark gap are that face each other the better it will work here I'm using two alligator clips which isn't that good since they have sharp teeth here I'm using two brass balls which is as good as you can possibly do you can get things like these at hardware stores like Home Depot look for roundish metal drawer handles any kind of metal will do as long as there's no coating on it but if you have too thick vert wires then you can put two rounded portions close together like this don't sit the wires going to the spark gap on the table that will decrease the performance by interacting with the table notice that I've got the wires in the air and the spark gap on a plastic jar now to try it out if your spark gap is weak then you might be able to hear it as a clicking sound but not see it if you don't hear anything at the spark gap at all than it isn't working how do you get it working it may not be working because your gap is too wide though if it's only a millimeter wide and that's probably not the problem the water entering the inductor should be a solid smooth stream and the water leaving it should look turbulent even though it's really individual drops if that's not the case reposition your inductors so that it is here's how I would adjust them if needed but my inductors were in a good place so I didn't need to do this if it's still not working look at the drops of water below the inductor it should be doing this repeatedly spraying out widely and then falling straight again if it's just coming down in a steady straight line then move the water streams closer to the inductor lines that will help with the induction if it's still not working then the problem may be with your tabletop mine is laminated and conducts electricity a little bit that allows the receivers to conduct electricity between them which makes it fail so I put my receivers in plastic containers to insulate the metal cans from the tabletop your tabletop may also be getting when wet tabletop or even just damp wood will conduct electricity hopefully by now you're getting a spark try increasingly with a spark gap if you're still getting sparks then they should be less often but brighter well thanks for watching check out my youtube channel rimstarorg for more videos like this that includes the one I mentioned explaining how a Kelvin water dropper works another how to make Franklin's Bell simple little science project and one on how to make a Joule thief that lights an LED from a dead battery and don't forget to subscribe if you like these videos or give a thumbs up or leave a question or comment below see you soon

Channel: RimstarOrg

Views: 84,966

Keywords: Kelvin water dropper, kelvin water drop experiment, lord kelvin's thunderstorm, kelvin thunderbolt, how to make, make, build, instructions, science project, science experiment, spark gap

Id: dB-76NdfTbU

Length: 7min 21sec (441 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 08 2013