Kind: captions
Language: en
so the people from The Hunger Games came
to me and they asked me if I wanted to
do an experiment that would be related
to power generation and strangely there
is this one idea that I've been thinking
about for years and now finally I have
the chance to do it come check it out
first positions here we go set and Dolly
lights and action we have a setup here
with two rain shower heads making two
streams of water now each stream is
going to pass through a set of coils
right up by
where they're released and then it
passes through this wire mesh down below
now these two sets of coils so this set
of coils is separate from this set of
coils and they're each connected to one
of these balls here once we get the
water flowing we should be able to
generate a little electric spark right
here there it is what's incredible is
that we're generating a spark which is
probably 5 to 10,000 Vols it would give
you a decent little shock I mean it's
not actually dangerous
because although the voltage is high
there's not that much charge behind it
so you can't get that much current
flowing and current is what really does
damage now the question is how just out
of this setup where we have falling
water and some pieces of metal do we
generate 10,000 volts well the way it
works is that normally water is
perfectly neutral there's even numbers
of positive ions and negative ions but
as the water comes out of these two
shower heads sometimes there's going to
be a slight imbalance maybe a little bit
more negative in this stream and a
little bit more positive in that stream
now normally that just kind of washes
out over time but not in this case
here's the ingenious part the mesh on
the left is connected to the ring on the
right so if this mesh becomes negatively
charged then so does this ring and now
that ring will attract the positively
charged water so this whole stream
becomes positively charged therefore
when it lands on this mesh this mesh
becomes positively charged as well which
means this coil over here is positively
charged forcing the negative ions to be
coming out of this stream more and so
what we have is a clear separation of
charge there's a positively charged
stream on the right and a negatively
charged stream on the left if you look
closely at the streams what you can
actually see is they get more and more
attracted to these top coils and then
the spark
goes and they reset
so basically what's happening is we're
building up charge on these coils and
then when a charge gets big enough it
jumps across from the negative side to
the positive side and everything becomes
neutral again and the charging process
can start aresh it's a pretty phenomenal
piece of physics I mean it's such a
basic setup and yet it produces this
very impressive result this was noticed
over a hundred years ago by a guy named
Lord Kelvin so it's often called Lord
kelvin's water dropper or Lord kelvin's
rainstorm it's a really impressive
phenomenon but you might be wondering
how much energy could I really get out
of this system well to put this in
perspective if you were to charge your
phone on the energy generated by this
setup it would take 6 and 1/2 years to
reach full charge so this is a very tiny
amount of energy generation that we're
talking about you know an interesting
thing to consider is where does this
electrical energy come from all we
really have is just falling water and
and metal pipes I want you to leave me
your answer in the comments below or
make me a video response