Re: Water capacitor, was: Re: General Questions

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>" <Mddeming-at-aol-dot-com>

In a message dated 4/11/01 8:22:58 PM Eastern Daylight Time, tesla-at-pupman-dot-com 
writes: 


>
> Original poster: "Dr. Duncan Cadd by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>
>
> " <dunckx-at-freeuk-dot-com> 
>
> Hi Mark, Terry, All! 
>
> I was interested to read of your experiences re designing one of these 
> things, Mark. 
>
> >The other problem is actually getting the parts clean.  EVERYTHING 
> that goes 
> >into the water (including the "tub") must be THOROUGHLY washed.  This 
> means 
> >soap and water, alcohol, MANY rinses, and then just letting things 
> soak for 
> >several weeks, and changing the water every day.  The problem is that 
> only a 
> >VERY few particles are needed to destroy the insulating properties of 
> the 
> >water. Soaking allows the "crud" to leech out of the plastic, metal, 
> etc. 
>
>
> Yes, that would be a real pain.  However, there is a far worse one. 
>
> The water molecule has a permanent net electric dipole. 
>
> This means that when placed in an electric field, the water molecule 
> tends to line up with the electric field lines like a magnet does with 
> magnetic field lines.  If the field oscillates, the molecules try to 
> follow the oscillation.  Moving water molecules takes energy, and the 
> dissipation factor of pure water at 20C at 1Mc/s is around 0,05 which 
> is 100x worse than a good TC cap material, or in other words, water is 
> lossy at rf, as Gary Johnson's recent experiments have confirmed. 
> (Mind you, ice at 3x10^9c/s has a dissipation factor of only 0,0009 
> (hence the low power "defrost" setting on the microwave oven) so for 
> that *really* tiny tc . . .)  Many rf heating applications e.g. timber 
> drying, industrial gluing operations, medical diathermy etc depend on 
> the dielectric loss of water to generate heat from the applied rf 
> field thereby drying the timber, setting the glue, heating the patient 
> or whatever. 
>
> For a pulse cap where generating rf is not an issue, this hardly 
> matters, and in fact a bit of built-in rf damping might even be 
> desirable depending on the application, but IMHO not a good choice for 
> a TC primary cap.  The rf performance is not going to be impressive. 
> An expensive way of brewing the coffee!  Sorry! 
>
> However, were it not for that permanent electric dipole, the protein 
> molecules in my body would be a different shape, to mention but one 
> consequence.  I think I'll forgive the dielectric loss under the 
> circumstances ;-) 
>
> Dunckx 
>



Hi Dunckx, Mark, All! 

Way back in school, a friend of mine in metallurgy fabricated a 
berylium-alloy softball bat at a cost of about $400 that worked almost as 
well as a $20 plain aluminum bat, but was a lot prettier. Am I missing 
something, or are super pure deionized water caps and their supporting 
equipment for Tesla Coils sort of the same kind of project? 

In the "backwaters" of West Virginia 
Matt D.