Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Experiment with balloon filled with charged gas

D4RR3N - 25-3-2014 at 14:18

If you strip electrons off gas molecules they must be loosing mass right? I mean you are taking matter away from the molecule so we would expect it to have less mass unless we believe electrons have no mass.

Stripping electrons off gas molecules would positively ionize the gas so essentially positively ionized gas should weigh less then unionized or negatively ionized gas?

Furthermore like charged gas molecules should mutually repel each other so positively ionized gas should have fewer molecules per unit volume ie positively ionized gas should have less mass and lower density then unionized gas.

My question is then would a balloon filled with positively ionized helium rise faster in the air then a balloon filled with uncharged gas?

[Edited on 25-3-2014 by D4RR3N]

DraconicAcid - 25-3-2014 at 14:23

Ionized helium is going to strip electrons away from anything it contacts to give regular helium gas, unless it's hot enough that a plasma is the more stable state (in which case, there's no balloon that will hold it).

bismuthate - 25-3-2014 at 14:23

Well good luck making He+(I don't think its been done)

D4RR3N - 25-3-2014 at 14:26

Quote: Originally posted by DraconicAcid  
Ionized helium is going to strip electrons away from anything it contacts to give regular helium gas, unless it's hot enough that a plasma is the more stable state (in which case, there's no balloon that will hold it).


If the balloon is an electrical insulator the gas inside the balloon will be electrically insulated to some degree?

D4RR3N - 25-3-2014 at 14:27

Quote: Originally posted by bismuthate  
Well good luck making He+(I don't think its been done)


All you need is helium gas and a high voltage electrostatic power supply.

Galinstan - 25-3-2014 at 14:33

as draconicacid said the helium ions will strip electrons off the first particle they come in to contact with and make helium gas regardless of whether or not it is an insulator and while you can ionise gas with HV it is not in any way stable at room temp.

DraconicAcid - 25-3-2014 at 14:34

Quote: Originally posted by D4RR3N  
If the balloon is an electrical insulator the gas inside the balloon will be electrically insulated to some degree?


No, because every time a helium ion hits the surface of the balloon, it will rip electrons away from whatever the balloon is made of (even if it is an insulator). Enough helium ions hit the balloon, the material is destroyed.

Artemus Gordon - 25-3-2014 at 14:42

Even ignoring the difficulties of working with ionized He, electrons have only 1/1800 of the mass of a proton or a neutron. There are 2 protons and 2 neutrons and 2 electrons in a He atom. So if you had 3600 grams of He and you ionized it completely, it would only be 1 gram lighter.

D4RR3N - 25-3-2014 at 14:45

Quote: Originally posted by DraconicAcid  
Quote: Originally posted by D4RR3N  
If the balloon is an electrical insulator the gas inside the balloon will be electrically insulated to some degree?


No, because every time a helium ion hits the surface of the balloon, it will rip electrons away from whatever the balloon is made of (even if it is an insulator). Enough helium ions hit the balloon, the material is destroyed.


Two solutions to that

1 you have a double walled container with vacuum between walls

2 you line the inside of the balloon with a coating which is electrically conductive, then you attach a + hv supply to the coating, like repels so the gas should be repelled away from the walls of the balloon.

option 2 is more practical

BTW the intention is to have an HV+ supply permanently attached to the balloon so the gas is continuously being charged.

Charged gas/air molecules wont destroy material, if they did the air ionizer I have by my bed would be doing me real harm :D

D4RR3N - 25-3-2014 at 14:51

Quote: Originally posted by Artemus Gordon  
Even ignoring the difficulties of working with ionized He, electrons have only 1/1800 of the mass of a proton or a neutron. There are 2 protons and 2 neutrons and 2 electrons in a He atom. So if you had 3600 grams of He and you ionized it completely, it would only be 1 gram lighter.


True but as I said charged gas molecules would mutually repel each other so they should be further spaced out ie lower density.

the decrease in density due to mutual repulsion may have a greater effect in this experiment then loss of mass due to loss of electrons

D4RR3N - 25-3-2014 at 14:53

I think Tesla was experimenting with something like this, judging on the pictures of his flying machines

violet sin - 25-3-2014 at 15:31

1) electrons ripped off inner lining, fail vacuum, shred outer lining and we are done.

2) so your other electrode goes in the center? if it's on the outside( HV - ) than the plasma and conductive HV + layer want out. if it's on the inside. so is your neg electrode and the supports. which will probably fail inside to out causing rupture again.

the air ionizer isn't trying to keep large volumes of gas ionized and confined. so the implied equivalence is not apparent to me. an ionizing electron wind from the home ionizer has close proximity sturdy electrodes, it isn't a raging ball of fire corralled by saran wrap or mylar.

also if no heat is evolved, like the home unit, where is your lift advantage? you are using current to pump in electrons, through a given space, causing dissociation and plasma. there is no net loss of electrons or mass, as everything is balanced... and confined. with out heat and expansion causing a drop in density, you just have a lame balloon that doesn't float. I don't see just how you plan on dumping the electrons out, and leaving only He+ in??? a large positive charged cloud will steal electrons from ANYTHING. 1)in an attempt to reach ground state, 2) to become neutral alleviating all the + to + pressure, 3) sheer force of the +,+ hatred being over come by a greater + force on thin lining???

the inner electrode would draw them in, and the outer HV + compressing from outside. also I think He ion, can (in a round about way) be thought of as free fluorine... tight posative core wantign its closest ( and only ) electrons. especially if you have some manner of depleting the electron population... they is HUNGRY

annaandherdad - 25-3-2014 at 16:06

There is some basic physics here. If you have a macroscopic sample of matter, say enough helium to fill a balloon, you can ionize all or most of the atoms if you want to (just heat it hot enough), but you can't create more than a microscopic charge imbalance. That is, the number of positive charges and the number of negative charges will be almost identical. The reason is that otherwise the Coulomb forces of repulsion would blow the system apart.

For example, suppose you have 1 liter of He at STP, occupying a cube 10cm on a side. That's .045 mole or 2.7x10^22 atoms. Suppose that one atom in a million is ionized to He+ and the electron is removed. That's 2.7x10^16 positive ions, or 4.3x10^-3 Coulombs contained in the cube. Divide this charge in two equal parts, assume they are 5cm apart. The force they exert on each other, by Coulomb's law, is (1/4*pi*epsilon0) Q^2/R^2, which I calculate to be 1.7x10^7 N or more than a million kg.

For reasons like this it's a basic principle of plasma physics that charge imbalances are always small and are quickly neutralized (by the motion of charge of the opposite sign) within a short time. The plasma is a gas of positive ions and negative electrons, in almost equal numbers.

D4RR3N - 25-3-2014 at 16:21

violet sin, there is not two HV electrodes, just like a van der graaf only has one hv collector

I have a very powerful high voltage electrostatic generator, half a million volts and the ions of that you can feel them and all the air around it is electrically charged when working so that the hair on your arms go up....and no it doesn't destroy material, dont know why people keep saying ionised gas will destroy a container, it wont even with half a million volts!

D4RR3N - 25-3-2014 at 16:26

annaandherdad : I dont intend to use heat to ionise gas because as you have said there is equal + & - ions, thats why a candle flame can be split in two by a HV supply.

I intend to strip the electrons off using HV electrostatics

D4RR3N - 25-3-2014 at 16:29

Another way to do this would be to mix a radioactive isotope with the helium but it is dangerous and I dont think it could ever create the same number of ionised gas molecules a HV supply could.

aga - 25-3-2014 at 16:37

Despite the obvious, i think the original post definitely has merit, and deserves more Thought than just saying why it cannot be So.

Viz : the ionised subtance has (maybe negligbly) lower Mass than the non-ionised substance.

Clearly in the Real World, it will get itself un-ionised pretty fast.
Maybe there is another way to get it less-weighted.

But then, a small leap of Imagination, and maybe the Real World ceases to be.

What that Leap might be is well beyond my knowledge.
Maybe the 'Baloon' could be some kind of 'Field' and not just Rubber, or something like that.

Shooting down Ideas using what are the Currently Perceived Facts has not served science well so far, so please stop perpetuating that particular error .

Use what you have learned, and Apply it, rather than just Repeat it Verbatim.

The world still isn't Flat despite us knowing next to nothing.

violet sin - 25-3-2014 at 21:22

annaandherdad: thanks for putting that much better words than I. the forces are immense. I don't think much else needs be said.

D4RR3N: heat or not a million kg of force from only 10cm^3 of 1 ppm ionized He, seems conclusive. unless you have access to technology NASA doesn't.

aga: " clearly in the real world, it will get itself un-ionized pretty fast " much easier to neutralize by sucking in mobile electrons, than hold back a tsunami of potential

if you wanna continue to run this as a thought exercise, assuming you figured out the material for the time being, try crunching some numbers. start with something small like annaandherdad, and just see what kind of forces you might harness.

D4RR3N - 26-3-2014 at 05:32

I don't know why but for some reason the statement I made about how mutually charged gas molecules would mutually repel leading to decrease in density is being completely ignored...why is that, do we have selective reading skills?

Also I can put a wire from a 500kv static generator and pass it through a regular rubber helium balloon and the charged gas atmosphere it would create within the balloon will not destroy the balloon and thatch at half a million volts!

An electrostatic field is the way to contain the positively charged gas molecules. I have suggested that if the balloon was itself positively charged the gas in its interior would be repelled away from the walls of the balloon by the field. Another way would be to make the balloon skin from an electrit material which has a permanent electrostatic field. If orientated correctly the positively charged gas molecules will be repelled by the skin of the balloon.

[Edited on 26-3-2014 by D4RR3N]

Nicodem - 26-3-2014 at 06:45

Oh no, not again!

https://www.sciencemadness.org/whisper/viewthread.php?tid=26...

MrHomeScientist - 26-3-2014 at 08:25

Treating this as only a thought experiment:
* While it is true that removing electrons from the gas will decrease the mass, the fact that an electron weighs 1/1800 as much as a nucleon means that their removal results in a completely negligible change in weight.
* The electrostatic repulsion in the plasma would lead to a decrease in density only if you keep the volume constant. Thus the total amount of gas in the chamber would have to decrease. I believe this could, in theory, produce a greater lift.

Practically:
This is completely impossible for the home experimenter, for all the reasons mentioned above.
Domestic air ionizers don't produce plasma - you would be. They are very, very different things.


Edit: Hah! Nicoderm, I knew this topic sounded familiar.

[Edited on 3-26-2014 by MrHomeScientist]

D4RR3N - 26-3-2014 at 14:16

The idea is not quite the same as far as I understand it, also you do not need a plasma to produce an electrically charged atmosphere. Remember a thunder cloud is highly electrically charged and it is not a plasma.

annaandherdad - 27-3-2014 at 07:21

D4RR3N---If you try to charge the surface of the balloon to repel the charges in the gas contained in the balloon, not only will the the surface of the balloon repel itself, but the repulsion of the charged gas for itself will create additional pressure on the surface of the balloon. And if there is more than a tiny imbalance of charge, either on the surface of the balloon or in the gas, these forces will be huge---think of the million kg---and the balloon will explode.

OTOH, if you make the surface of the balloon as a permanent dipole layer, then to a first approximation the field of the positive charges will cancel the field of the negative charges---if the arrangement is spherically symmetric, the cancellation is perfect in the interior, where the electric field arising from the dipole layer is zero---this is Newton's theorem. The force of repulsion of the charged gas for itself will still be transferred as extra pressure to the surface of the balloon---million kg again.

D4RR3N - 28-3-2014 at 06:10

Quote: Originally posted by annaandherdad  
D4RR3N---If you try to charge the surface of the balloon to repel the charges in the gas contained in the balloon, not only will the the surface of the balloon repel itself, but the repulsion of the charged gas for itself will create additional pressure on the surface of the balloon. And if there is more than a tiny imbalance of charge, either on the surface of the balloon or in the gas, these forces will be huge---think of the million kg---and the balloon will explode.

OTOH, if you make the surface of the balloon as a permanent dipole layer, then to a first approximation the field of the positive charges will cancel the field of the negative charges---if the arrangement is spherically symmetric, the cancellation is perfect in the interior, where the electric field arising from the dipole layer is zero---this is Newton's theorem. The force of repulsion of the charged gas for itself will still be transferred as extra pressure to the surface of the balloon---million kg again.


I dont know how you are arriving at those numbers (millions of kg) but they are wrong for sure. Taking a balloon gluing aluminum foil onto its surface and connecting it to a hv psu will not generate a blast equivalent of millions of kgs

annaandherdad - 28-3-2014 at 08:02

The numbers come from Coulomb's law, the assumptions were explained above (that 1 liter of He has a charge imbalance of 10^-6). You get less force if the charge imbalance is less. The point is that you can never approach any significant fraction of charge imbalance in any macroscopic sample of matter, because the Coulomb forces are too large.

And if you do have a charge imbalance in the gas, the force of repulsion will be transferred to the balloon as excess pressure, whether or not you charge the balloon itself.