Anyone play around with Van De Graaff generators?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Thinking about making one of these my next “I’m bored in the middle of a pandemic” purchase.

Had my eyes on this one

Or this one

The first one seems to be better reviewed, but isn’t 325 KV getting close to where they could be dangerous? Anyone have a specific model they’ve played with? Cool tricks beyond what you always see on Youtube? (raising hair, lighting lamps, foam peanuts and pie plates)?

I already have a Wimshurst machine, but it seems kind of limiting as to what to do with it besides making sparks.

2

Really, making sparks is it.
Unless you have some high-vacuum equipment and want to make a particle accelerator.

3

What would it take to do some electrospinning?

4

Yeah, but they’re really cool sparks.

5

I taught high school physics for a while, and dusted one off for lessons. They have a few uses for cool demonstrations, but that is about it. It can give neat sparks to make you look like a mad scientist. Taping a bunch of pith balls to it, then watching them rise up as they acquire a charge. I don’t think that most are powerful enough to get a person’s hair to stand up, but I don’t remember trying it. It probably seemed a bit too dangerous to me.

Bottom line IMO: cool to see for a short while, but otherwise not too interesting.

6

For those that want to try high-voltage generators on the cheap,
there’s a device called a Lord Kelvin water drop generator:

7

I’ve played with van de Graaf, Wimshurst, and even the Kelvin water droplet high voltage generators. At school we had a van de Graaf generator inside a high pressure air tank (compressed air is much better at resisting sparking) for a particle accelerator but I never did play with that.

I toy with the idea of building a van de Graaf generator with active belt charging but never get around to it.

8

I’ve used a HUGE Van de Graaf generator. They were originally built as particle accelerators, not as static electricity pedagogical devices. I used it for sending fast electrons or nuclei at targets to create defects. Lotsa fun.

Speaking of which, the giant tandem Van de Graaf generator in the Boston Museum of Science is actually one of Van de Graaf’s own Van de Graaf generators. Only it’s just used as a static electricity pedagogical device these days. Pretty effectively, too.