Testatika Small Machine Testbed 2 - April 1, 2008 - Vinyl backing testing

I previously verified with my 2 disk setup using a vinyl disk for the second disk resulted in larger varying voltage at the side antenna keys. Now I modified my single disk small machine testbed to test this here too. The purpose in using the vinyl is that it can be charged negatively by rubbing it with a hand. This is called the triboelectric effect and provides a high voltage source. Support for this idea comes from two things. The first is that the backing for the single disk small machine is black, just like the back disk of the 3kW machine, and could be vinyl. The second is the following quote from a visitor report:

From the quote we can speculate that the 2 symmetrical plexiglass plates are actually a chargable material, just as vinyl is.

As the photos below show, I taped two rectangular pieces of vinyl to the back of my machine. The vinyl was taken from leftovers from window blinds.

With the disk turning - before charging the vinyl by rubbing.

With the disk turning - after charging the vinyl by rubbing.

Leftover rolls from vinyl window blinds.

I'll repeat the same speculation I put on the page where I used a vinyl record. Why the chargable material? It's known that the disk is first turned by hand and that after a few turns, the disk then turns by itself. The "something" that taps into an energy source to get excess energy may need the oscillations you see above in order to do the tapping. Once the energy source has been tapped into, that energy may be used to:

• keep the disk rotating,
• charge up some capacitors to continue to provide the charge that the chargable material provides since it may disipate, and
• be fed into the pots (the two large cans) which convert it to DC, or high frequency pulses DC, or DC with high frequency AC riding on top, all of which would look like straight DC to an analog meter. This is the output.