I'm bothered by the "When the plates of the stator and rotor reach their closest approach, thin wires will make contact, allowing charges to transfer between them."
Commutating wires on a rotating structure?
RL
Re: Solar powered electrostatic motor drone ??
Jul 18, 2024
Last reply: 2 years ago
24 Replies
Piezo motors are common where teeny tiny movement is needed, as in scanning tunneling microscopes or hard disk head positioning actuators.
Jeroen Belleman
They sure are, ~200MW when everything is running.
Jeroen Belleman
Sure. Commutators were common in electric motors. The details of their construction may vary, depending on voltages and currents involved.
Anecdote: I ran this van de Graaff in my garage one day, and a spider on the ceiling got attacted to the HV terminal. When it hit, it was violently repulsed back up to the ceiling, to be attracted down again after it hit. This repeated at a rate of many times per second. That must have been quite the ride for the little beastie.
Jeroen Belleman
Sounds like entropy to me.
Perhaps the 'wires' have sufficient inductance to allow efficient energy transfer / charge reversal.
RL
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