Self-pumped vacuum capacitor effect

An attempt to reclaim a lost Nikola Tesla idea-sequence!

The air pressure within a tiny metal-walled chamber will slowly fall, ifit's full of glowing plasma. Air turns to solid oxides/nitrides, leaving vacuum behind. It's a historical Ion pump, a "Tesla coil" vacuum pump with no moving parts. Nickky T. reported this phenomenon in 1892, and used the effect to pump down his x-ray tubes in the days before the other vacuum pumps (Sprengel, etc.,) had any hope of reaching the required low pressures for X-rays. Today if you're working with cold-cathode non-Coolidge x-ray tubes, you can cure a gassy tube by running it for hours until the pressure falls low enough. Other stuff at http://amasci.com/weird/wtext.html

Handheld Tesla coils can be obtained at http://www.teachersource.com/ElectricityAndMagnetism/TeslaCoils.aspx , or http://www.electrotechnicproduct.com/pinhole.asp,or search eBay for "violet wand."

Note: Trolls & spammers blocked immediately. Zero tolerance.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• science
• physics
• tesla
• coil
• plasma
• high
• voltage
• weird

[notexactlyIO]

Did you open it up and examine the metal's surface?

[wbeaty]

> open it up and examine

@notexactlyIO Not this one. I should do it again, but with a bit of tape in one spot.  Peel the tape to compare the unaffected surface.

[U235hexafluoridedude]

Oh that's cool, I'm currently at Bellevue College, just a few minutes from you and have a stainless UHV system for 70KeV D-D neutron generation and always wondered but was never sure what caused this effect within the chamber. This seems to works best with more reactive metals and the effect I was seeing in my system was likely from the outgassy (non-stainless) contact and connections I had on the HV lines like silver and tungsten. Regardless, that's very cool, thanks!

[wbeaty]

@U235hexafluoridedude Actually the effect is harnessed in professional sputter-ion pumps for UHV systems where turbopumps can't reach, 10e-9 Torr and below. I wanted to see if Tesla could easily have observed it accidentally and perhaps early-on harnessed this to achieve high vac needed for X-ray tubes, even before any others designed pumps to reach those values. No good explanation for Tesla's pre-Roentgen 1895 x-ray shadowgraph of a human foot inside a shoe, recovered from March 1895 lab fire

[teslaandlyne]

Where did the space matter between the plates go to allow the ink to flow.

[wbeaty]

@teslaandlyne Plasma turns the oxygen in the air into aluminum oxide. Maybe the nitrogen gets turned into aluminum nitride. Also, high voltage drives individual air molecules into the metal surface. So even argon or helium pressure might start dropping.

[jedus1]

I tried to use an Ion pump once, It didnt work, it just burnt my penis, no actual size increase.

[deathjr277]

i like science =p, but i h8 biology lol

[ProjectPurposeifyYou]

I'd googled it, it was Jean-Pierre Petit MHD propulsion system, a vacuum thrust propulsion system that decomposes air in the desired direction of travel. When I'd read about it years ago it suggested that the vacuum created would only be a couple of milimetres thick and that atmospheric air pressure would push the craft from below to fill the ever ending void of air. My reasoning was that air pressure from above would be enough to fill the void therefore it wouldn't work.

What do you think?

[ProjectPurposeifyYou]

Isn't there a french guy that came up with a vacuum thrust propulsion system similar to this process that decomposes air in the desired direction of travel. Apparently magnetic fields on the perimeter of the disc controlled the direction of flight. I'd read about it ages ago and thought it was all shit. The top of the disc was I think constructed of Teflon and the craft supposedly used microwaves or excellerated electrons in a vacuum

Do you think the cathode ray propulsion legend is a myth?

[wbeaty]

@glutinousmaximus Never saw an experimentalist in action? Worked in a lab? One rapidly discovers that "The Scientific Method" doesn't exist, it's an invention of grade school teachers, and today even in grade school it's removed from books and replaced with chapters on "Nature Of Science" NOS.

"king of Klutz"

like the sound of your own voice""

New here, eh? Trolls blocked immediately, zero tolerance.

[armydude96]

I'm not exactly sure what you did but it seemed pretty cool