By rubbing a cotton cloth along a PVC pole, static electricity is generated. How can this be used to charge a capacitor?
http://home.earthlink.net/~lenyr/stat-gen.htm is what I'd like to do, but it doesn't explain how it should be wired up.
Answer
To get the charge from the PVC into a capacitor, you could ground one side of the cap, and attach a wire to the other side of the cap. The end of the wire should preferably end in a fine point or collection of fine points, and you sweep this over the charged surface of the PVC to collect what charge you can.
If you use a smaller capacitor you will tend to get more voltage, but even a small capactior (e.g., 100pF) is probably only going to get as far as a couple of volts, even off a PVC surface charged to 10's of kV, because the capacitance of the PVC surface probably isn't even 0.1pF.
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