For my third project, I went back to my roots and decided to pull out my knowledge of high voltages to make something fun and dangerous! While researching what I should do I had a bit of serendipity and stumbled across some new scientific research and the tools needed to duplicate it at the same time.

In October a paper was published on a discovery was made by some physics students called the water bridge. By applying 15kV DC to two glasses of distilled water, they could get the water to rise out of the glass and form a flowing bridge. The glasses could then be seperated and the bridge would be left hanging in midair, with both water and electricity flowing through it. One would think that the water would spill out of the glasses and just travel along the floor, but this seems to defy physics. There is no current solution to this problem, but the theory is the the molecules polarize and build a microstructure and the form of an actual "bridge" as we would think of it, thus allowing flow across it. This "bridge" plus the force of water surface tension seems to be enough to defy gravity when used for fairly small bridges, but this also depends on the voltage applied.

I've seen the experiment duplicated one other time using 9 kV for a smaller bridge. I've also heard that this is not a new discovery and was made by Germans in maybe the early 1900's? It was called the "wassenfadden" effect and was induced with the use of a large Wimhurst static machine. I was gifted with an old broken X-ray transformer, capable of producing 75 kV! It has internal shorting at the higher voltages but depending on the use I have been able to get it up to about 75% before shorting occurs and my variac fuse blows violently. That's plenty of voltage to build a nice bridge. The only other caveat (but it's also kind of cool), is that the internal shorting and sparking is reflected in the flow of the water bridge, creating ripples in the bridge instead of a nice smooth bridge. This keeps my from streching out my bridge much more than the other bridges due to voltages spikes that cause the bridge to fail.

Photo Gallery

Videos below!

First Run

Second Run

Fun Sparking!