perfecting and explaining the plasma toroid

this is a plasma toroid generator a desktop device that generates a ring of plasma the same material that's in the Sun at your desk in the last video I explained how it works but it turned out I was wrong and also I've done experiments with this device since then and this is my second generation of the device and it's lighter runs cooler and it's more robust here look and also there is a giveaway at the end sponsored by engineered Labs I'm going to be giving away samples of potassium and platinum so uh enjoy the video [Music] okay so I should probably address the elephant in the room and that's that the plasma toroid is not a new discovery I thought it was when I discovered magic Plasma's device last summer but it turns out according to high voltage YouTuber and researcher viduli this phenomena was discovered back in 1884 by a German physicist named Johann Wilhelm hitorff I practiced that and I think I did okay anyway so hittorff experimented with evacuated glass vessels charged with high voltage and he discovered the plasma toroid using a pulsed excitation wait I should probably explain how this correctly Works starting with electric fields and electric currents so the first thing you need to know in order to understand the plasma toroid is that when electricity or electric current is flowing through a wire there's a magnetic field created around the wire like like this this is the magnetic field it's curling like this and the electricity is going this way right and when you change the electric current the magnetic field will also change with it this is just a property of electricity and magnetism and one more thing that is important to know is that when you wrap a wire into the shape of a coil like this that adds up the magnetic field around each turn of the wire making a stronger magnetic field down the center of the coil of wire this is the coil that I was talking about this is the oscillator circuit that switches current back and forth through these coils and since there's current changing that means there's a magnetic field around these coils and that magnetic field is also changing in size that's what I mean by changing I mean the strength of the magnetic field is constantly changing and since that magnetic field is constantly changing it's going to create another electric field one of its own and the shape of that electric field is going to be in a ring sound familiar heck yeah I should have known but I didn't I thought it was the magnetic field last video and that is just wrong when the circular electric field is strong enough it'll start to rip off electrons from the atoms inside this globe and form plasma and another consequence of charged particles accelerating in an electric field is sometimes a high energy electron will run into an ion and they'll recombine and the electron will fall from its high energy state to a low energy State and emit light that is why the plasma is glowing because electrons are falling from higher energy states to low energy states so let's take a break from the theory and see the experiments that I've been working on since the last video the first experiment is with my old device and I wanted to see what would happen to the toroid if the generator was placed at 90 degrees to the horizontal and as you can see it's kind of hard to start but if you give it an old twist then it generates a static discharge and then you start it up and as you can see the ring got squished and it looks like half a circle or at least half the size of the coil and that's because the plasma is hot compared to the surrounding gas and so it rises and squishes the ring it's really pretty and bright and it also made my device pretty hot yeah now I also tried it so I flipped the generator upside down look at that let's play soccer you may be wondering what the squealing sound is and I think it's the plasma vibrating against the glass and then the glass vibrates too but I'd love to hear your guys thoughts in the comments now that we know that the plasma toroid has thermal characteristics like convection I wanted to cool it down and so I used liquid nitrogen which is at negative 321 degrees Fahrenheit and I poured it on top of the glass globe as you can see here I'm just doing little drops but I was hoping maybe it would stabilize the plasma because it would slow down the molecules I also cooled it down to this method all right well I think it's dancing more I know that's not a scientific description but it's definitely the glass is a lot colder and since the beginning I've always wanted to make this thing play music so I got a function generator app which sends signals as you can see from my phone to a Bluetooth music receiver that puts it into the circuit sine wave in three two oh oh yeah it's yeah it started flashing but then I think that interrupted its ability to stay ignited seventeen thousand whoa fifteen thousand twelve thousand and it's ringing timing 600 500 400. so clearly this design isn't capable of doing what I wanted to so it's time to make the second iteration of the design and I'm basing it off a circuit by Steve Ward one of the founding fathers of the modern day Tesla coil and I'm just going to start with that so let's build it [Music] all right [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] so now that we've got the second generation of the plasma toroid driver let's see if this one will make music okay well no oscillations are starting I think going forward I'll get an oscilloscope and then we can scope it and see what's happening all right guys so this is the new circuit with the new mosfet FDA 18 and 50 and if we look at the data sheet we can see that the lowest voltage that you need to turn on the switch is three volts but if the maximum voltage is 2.7 volts I can't use this Bluetooth receiver as the signal generator for my new circuit [Music] [Music] get it right [Music] foreign [Music] and perfect bias as in switching then you get it to go in the middle [Music] check that out oh my God are you seeing this we turn up the current now three amps increase the bias Maybe oh yeah there we go see got the plasma tourway oh sick it's floating in the middle guys we did it oh oh wow it's just going crazy what's really cool is once it floats in the center it does turn green and I think that's because it's really acting as an inductive load for the oscillator and so it's able to create those Xenon eczemers there we go and so stable for a while look at that there we go well that's all I've got for you guys this time I hope you enjoyed the experiments the theory the updates I'm also giving away these two element cubes to viewers who suggest in the comments below a cool video idea and also if you like the video and subscribe you get bonus entries if you want to see more cool science content from me I'm on Instagram at back max I and also I have a patreon if you want to support me and my experiments I would really appreciate it so thank you so much so if you made it this far into the video it means you're a nerd like me or you haven't accepted that you're a nerd yet but guess what we're now gonna go over how the oscillator circuit Works step by step it's called a Class E oscillator we're going to be basically turning Steve Ward's paper into a animated circuit diagram so let's jump right into it here's the circuit the capacitor filters the megahertz Ripple and the potentiometer manages the bias or the voltage that's fed to the mosfet's gate and the inductor L1 provides the input current to the Circuit then we also have the 15 volt TVs diode from gate to source of the mosfet that should limit the voltage seen at the gate to around 15 volts anyway notice how on the right side of the circuit you have L2 and you have capacitor CD and CG in series that forms an LC circuit and that will resonate and that will produce a resonant current I'll talk about that in a sec so at turn on you provide 19.5 volts and the tank capacitors they're charged by the input current through L1 it'll also go through L2 as well and I adjust the potentiometer to increase the voltage of the mosfet gate until the gate voltage is equal to the mosfet's threshold voltage and at that point the mosfets drained a source Junction will conduct discharging the tank capacitors through the plasma Drive coil L2 with current flowing in the negative Direction and so now that there's a negative resonant current the gate voltage is pulled Low by the capacitive voltage divider formed by CD and CG until the gate voltage drops beneath the threshold voltage and the mosfet stops conducting right so resonant current is negative therefore the phase shifted voltage signal seen at the gate is also holds a negative and the circuit starts to turn off the mosfet now that the mosfet isn't conducting the mosfet acts like a capacitor and the voltage of its output capacitance which I call C OS will start to increase as it's charged by the input current and the resonant current so the output capacitance is being charged up and the resonant current through the plasma Drive coil or L2 goes positive again it switches directions because it's a resonant current and once its magnitude is greater than that of the input current coming through L1 C OS is discharged through L2 and this is important because we don't want a positive or non-zero voltage on C OS when the mosfet turns back on otherwise that energy stored in seaos will be shorted through the body of the mosfet and cause Heating and we don't want that so we want the voltage of seaos to be at zero when the gate voltage reaches the threshold voltage the resonant current eventually goes negative again flowing back through L2 and we're back to the beginning of a cycle and the cycle occurs 15.5 million times per second and every time the mosfet switches on and off there's a possibility for imperfect switching which means heating of the mosfet and if the mosfet gets too hot it will Short Circuit and die and I mean that's just not good because mosfets are like four bucks and this is why we need to ensure that zero voltage switching is occurring in our circuit which means that the mosfet's output capacitance is at zero volts when the mosfet becomes conductive again that's good and here's our waveform our favorite cursed ass waveform there she is and going forward I'm gonna try to make YouTube my career so wish me luck I guess

Channel: BackMacSci

Views: 347,996

Keywords: chemistry, science, physics, stem, experiments, plasma, plasmaart, auroraborealis, desktoy, engineering, highvoltage

Id: GbMAvn7nRWo

Length: 18min 57sec (1137 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 07 2023