RE: Liquid Layered Capacitors

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: "Jim Mora" <jmora@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Hi Crispy, very cool idea...

http://www.oliveoilsource.com/olivechemistry.htm

Dialectric 3.2. I learned some neat stuff on the page! Air is 3, higher is
better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_strength by contrast teflon
is 60. Maybe you could make a flat capacitor in a say 10"x10" Tupperware
container and fill it with mineral oil. Using foil and a high/thin insulator
waxed paper, or better nearly any pastic will do, with Polyprolyene or
Teflon being the best. Remember the closeness of the plates and surface area
matters and is a balancing act with the dialectric strength.

Jim Mora

Many on the list have made capacitors, I appeal to their experience. And
they would know how to get the air pockets out too. I friend of mine made
some from the Richard Hull Tapes which were very nice.


-----Original Message-----
From: Tesla list [mailto:tesla@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Sunday, November 26, 2006 12:47 PM
To: tesla@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Liquid Layered Capacitors

Original poster: "Breneman, Chris" <brenemanc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Hello,

I'm new to building tesla coils, and am trying to get my first one
built.  The problem is that I have very little money available to
spend on materials.  The main thing I'm trying to get now is a
capacitor for the primary circuit, and it looks like my best option
is to build one.  I've seen a number of designs for homemade
capacitors, but came up with one myself, and was wondering if anyone
has tried it, or if there is any inherent problem in the design.
I was thinking that the most efficient and easy-to-build designs were
liquid capacitors where at least one of the plates is a liquid such
as salt water.  The most common design of a liquid capacitor seems to
be filling bottles with the solution and putting them all in a vat
with another conductive solution.  But isn't this wasting space due
to the large plates?  The best space-savers seem to be layered
capacitors, which also seem to be pretty efficient (from what I've
read), but the recurring problem is apparently that the solids don't
get extremely close contact with each other.  So I got thinking ...
what if a layered liquid capacitor could be built?  Or more like
liquids that could dry.
Here's one specific design idea that I had: Inside of some kind of
bottle, put a small amount of salt water, then a layer of olive oil
as a dielectric.  Olive oil will float on top of the water and
generally has a higher freezing point than water
(http://www.oliveoilsource.com/olive_chemistry_freezing.htm) so it
should be possible to freeze this or at least make it harden somewhat
without causing the water to freeze and expand - this could
potentially be done in a refrigerator.  After the layer of oil
hardened, a small layer of hot glue could be placed on top of it to
prevent it from mixing with above layers.  Then more salt water could
be added, and the process repeated, until there were enough layers to
fill the bottle.
One problem with this is that I can't find the breakdown voltage of
olive oil.  Does anyone happen to know this?  Also, is there any
mechanical or other problem with this design that would prevent it
from working?

Thanks,
Crispy