discovering high voltage capacitors can be tricky. Sure, you can buy these capacitors, however they are commonly costly as well as difficult to discover precisely what you want. [RachelAnne] needed some low-value variable capacitors that would work at 100 kV. So she made some.
Instead of fabricating the plates directly, these capacitors utilize laminations from a scrap power transformer. These usually have two kinds of plates, one of which appears like a letter “E” as well as the other just like a directly bar. For dielectric, the capacitors utilize typical transparency film.
As you may expect, she had to strip off the insulating varnish where the get in touch with was to be made with the plates. The moving system utilizes a toy cars and truck tire as a handle to make sure it is insulated. The screw moves one set of plates in as well as out while the other side stays fixed.
For more capacity, it would assist to utilize a thinner dielectric. The transparency film is about 100 microns thick as well as there are a number of sheets in between each plate. According to the post, there are 400 microns of dielectric as well as 600 microns air gap, so that’s a millimeter space between each plate. Of course, the voltage capability depends upon the space as well as the dielectric constant, so as well thin as well as you may requirement a much better dielectric to handle the high voltage.
We’ve definitely seen homemade high voltage caps before. You can likewise make your own supercapacitors, however they most likely aren’t going to take 100 kV.