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Friday, May 13, 2011

Plastic Plate Capacitors - Hack a Day

Plastic Plate Capacitors

posted May 12th 2011 12:08pm by Kevin Dady
filed under: HackIt

We have been featuring some home made capacitors this week, and [Mike] wrote in to share his with us. While rolled capacitors are nice, they can be somewhat difficult to construct and grow to unwieldy sizes as capacitance and voltages increase. His solution is to stack the layers up using plastic plates.

In this forum post he explains that using disposable plastic plates and tinfoil you’re able to quickly make a capacitor, that for him was valued at around 12.2nF, using eleven layers . Applying pressure to the stack capacitance grew to about 14nF, though he is having a bit of trouble holding it with just glue.

Testing was conducted with high voltages charging the capacitor up, then its leads were shorted for a nice spark and a good pop. Definitely fun for the next family cook out, though we don’t know how some left over potato salad goo would effect the end results.

tagged: diy capacitors

Go there...
http://hackaday.com/2011/05/12/plastic-plate-capacitors/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+hackaday%2FLgoM+%28Hack+a+Day%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

High Voltage Capacitor Discharge

Video Link...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvn0iuc0eO4

High Voltage Capacitor Shorting Steel Wool

Video Link...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCRqRb2nRTQ

So tonight I was thinking, those plastic drinking cup caps are really nice and all, but its a pain to put the Al Foil on the cups, so I went to Safeway and bought 15 of there large sized plastic plates, probably Polystyrene ( no not the real styrofoam type, they feel like regular plastic) i took foil and put it in between each plate alternating sides and connecting them. I have here my stack of 11 plates that gives a total of 12.2nF!!! Amazing I know, however it can be stretched to 14nF if pressure is applied to the plates to hold em together better. I glued them all together but they still are hard to keep together. I have tested with 2 MOT's parallel'd primaries, series'd secondarys off 120vac unballasted. Around 7kv Peak output. But probably normally around 4-5kv. The cap tested perfectly, I hooked it up, after a second I heard a little change in noise, unplugged the MOT's, and shorted the connections of the capacitor and it made a nice spark with a good pop. The cap was not warm, and it was not even under oil! However I am hoping for others to copy this design and test on HV to see how much they can take. Please Comment on it! Thanks, Mike