Water Batteries

by

Nestor Hernandez, Delan Kai, and Drew Moses

 

Materials used:
-Two Metal Buckets
-Package of Styrofoam Cups
-Wire coat-hangers
-Three Bricks as Weights
-Clear, Plastic, Flexible Tubing
-One T-piece for the Tubing
-Two taps for the Tubing
-Music Stand to Support Tubing Over Buckets
-Garden Hose

What we did:
-Placed styrofoam cups on ground and placed metal buckets on top of them so that the buckets were about 5cm apart from each other
-Straightened out wire coat-hangers and bent small loops at the end of them
-Wrapped other ends of coat-hangers to bricks
-Placed bricks in buckets and arranged wires to pass within 1cm of each other and have the loops over the opposite buckets
-Attached garden hose to water source, then attached to tubing
-Taped tubing with taps on music stand so that the taps dripped water down through the loops
-Turned on water so that there was a smooth flow of water through the taps that broke into droplets when passing through the loops

What we thought should happen:
-Since the buckets are standing on good insulators (the styrofoam cups) then one should be more negatively charged than the other
-The wire with the loop over the oppositve bucket should repel electrons in the water back up to the taps and making it more postively charged
-The positively charged wire will attract electrons coming from the tap into the water passing through that loop and making it negatively charged
-When this water falls into the positively charged bucket, it increases the negative charge
-Newly created droplets head towards the bucket with the same charge as themselves
-There should be a spark of electricity at the point where the wires are 1cm apart from each other

Why we think the project did not work:
-The experiment will not work when there is much humidity in the air, and the last couple of days there has been 100% humidity
-The water we used had chlorine and affected the ions in the water
-The wire coat-hangers might have had plastic coatings over them
-The bricks might have not been suitable weights to hold the wire

Reason for doing this project:
-The concept of this project made sense, so we thought to try to create a physical demonstration
-This idea is similar to our anti-gravity machine we made for our midterm in terms of achieving the seemingly impossible
-It's WEIRD SCIENCE to try to create electricity from just water and NO electrical source!!!

Our video documentary (3 megs):

HERE