Static Electricity

[HannahI 0]

I have an idea to create electricity.What you do is you create static electricity then to get into the AC outlets by having the static electricity move continuously.Save the Planet

[tansqrx 0]

You have two problems here.1. Wall outlets are AC (alternating current) and static electricity is DC (direct current).2. Static electricity is very high voltage (several thousand volts) but almost no current.There is much more to it than this but I don’t want to crack open my EE books at the moment.

[yordan 10]

What you do is you create static electricity then to get into the AC outlets by having the static electricity move continuously.

Of course you have to do this 50 times per second (if you are in the USA) or 60 times per second (if you are in Europe).Unfortunately, you need several seconds in order to get charged with static electricity, so I'm not convinced that is method is easily usable.
Moreover, there are other side effects. If you want this thing to be useful, you must transfer some non-neglectible power. For instance charge a battery first, the connect the battery to a DC/AC converter, and then sell the AC electricity to an Electricity distributor (let's say Con Edison).
Charging yourself with static electricity raises no problem.
However, in order to put the electricity inside a battery, you need to establish a circuit between you and the battery, and there will be current between parts of your body and parts of the battery. At this point, you must remember that no electricity has to cross through your heart (at least far less than 9 milliampers) ; and your heart is between your hands, so if one hand touches the battery and the other hand touches something metallic, great danger.

[mahesh2k 0]

You can do that with static electricity. But in large scale,will this idea work?. and most important point is it cheaper?. if so, then there are no issues with it getting implemented. Else even if this idea being better will not help.

[yordan 10]

S. Wul, in 1957, wrote a book based on this idea. The frech title was "Ohms en Serie", with a funny ethno-electrical joke.

[grim reaper1666 0]

i would have thought you could use two pads rubbing together and the rubbing is done by a machine which is power by the static electricity and also generates electricity as well as putting some of the other static electricity into the ac port. Although that would properly take to long and cost more power in the long run so there is no point on doing this i suppose. You would just get chased down with power bills in the end, why don't people in heavy windy areas use loads of small wind turbines which are on the roof of their houses to generate electricity. or even get a disel engine which can run on bio diesel and use it to generate elcetricity and so it's c02 doesnt go into the atmospehere keep it in a small airtight room outsde which filters the c02 out and slowly sends it on to plants in your garden.

[tansqrx 0]

Of course you have to do this 50 times per second (if you are in the USA) or 60 times per second (if you are in Europe).

Itâs 60 Hz in North America and 50 Hz in Europe.

 

Another big problem is that static electricity is hard to control because it is essentially a cloud of electrons (or lack of electrons) on your body just waiting for a path to ground. If you built a machine that discharged the static electrons from your finger but on your way to the machine you hit your leg against grounded metal, the electrons would be discharged and you would have to start over.

 

The only consistent way to create enough static electricity would be to use a device such as a Van de Graaff generator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_de_Graaff_generator). The Van de Graaff generator requires motion (energy) to work as you need to move a belt from the bottom to the top of the sphere. Since you have to have energy to move the belt, why not just attach your energy source directly to an AC or DC generator which would be much more efficient?

 

The underlying problem is that you still do not have enough current in a static electricity discharge to do much useful work. Perhaps enough to power a solar calculator for a few seconds.