Re: SCIENCE FAIR BOTTLE CAPACITOR ExPERIMENT HELP!!!

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

Original poster: Karl L <karl-at-coolbluesky-dot-com> 

To Evaluate various electrolytes in capacitor duty, you could use the nf,
uf, f scale of a modern multimeter to determine capacitance.  Saturated
NaCl solution works well, but you will probably discover that many other
solutions do also.  For whatever reason, Corona beer bottles seem to make
the best Salt water/beer bottle capacitor around.  Utilize the Geek Group
design, with Corona Bottles,  and you will not be disapointed.

If you are on a super-tight budget - a 2 liter soda bottle either wrapped
in foil, or immersed in NaCl will also make an awesome cap.  The corona
seems to appear right at the solution line, and can ultimately  destroy
the cap.unless an  oil layer is floated.

Part of the fun and educational experience is in designing your own cap,
and testing :"by fire"  You should have no problem in coming up with a
hypothosis of some sort.


Best Regards,

Karl Lindheimer
"
  On Wed November 19 2003 10:38 pm, Tesla list wrote:
 > Original poster: Jim Lux <jimlux-at-earthlink-dot-net>
 >
 > At 07:47 AM 11/19/2003 -0700, you wrote:
 > >Original poster: "Nightmare" <nightmare-at-bak.rr-dot-com>
 > >I am going to see which liquid in a bottle cap is the best. like i
 > > will use salt water in one test and gatorade(lots of electrolytes)
 > > for another. Can someone tell me how I would compare which is
 > > better??? or how i would check which is better?
 >
 > All manner of ways to evaluate it..
 > First, you could use standard lab techniques to characterize the
 > capacitor (loss and capacitance...)  This would require some moderately
 > specialized equipment which you could make (i.e. an impedance bridge).
 >
 > Or, you could measure the performance in terms of its effect on the
 > Tesla coil output, for some metric like "longest spark".
 >
 > You'd also want to characterize how the tuning of the primary changed,
 > if at all.