Sparks from Falling Water: Kelvin's Thunderstorm

Key Takeaways

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