My Ion Generator

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My Ion Generator (6/28/10)

I needed a positive ion generator for a project I'm working on. It needed to produce a ton of protons, so I used a 3 watt 12,000 volt/.16mA high voltage power supply (15v/1A input) combined with these:

Close up of the cathodes for my ion generator

LeeAnn Herreid at Individual Icons, who made some awesome wedding rings for my wife and I, created them from scratch using sterling silver. We jokingly called them a half sea urchin for obvious reasons. I sharpened the one on the right with the least number of points and installed it in my generator.

The business end of my ion generator with the lights on

The anode is a regular 2" copper pipe joiner that is flush with the cathode from a side perspective. There's an array of drinking straws (no joke) behind it which stabilize the air flow past the cathode, and I used Kapton sourced from EBay to insulate it all. Those steps paid off big time:

The business end of my ion generator in a dark room

That's St. Elmo's fire. Usually these things produce a little tiny dot of glow but this thing is producing flows of plasma to that copper ring, which is attached to the ground of the power supply. It produces a ton of ozone too when it's going.

For the photography folks, this is a 10 second exposure on Fujicolor Superia ISO 1600 color film with a Nikon FG, 50mm lens, f/2.2 with a Macro +4 filter added up front. I used an infinity background and a tripod, which you can see below, as well as how sensitive the film is. This is a 1/1000 second exposure around f/8 I think:

Shooting the photos

Next step is to install one of the cathodes with more points, and then solidify the straw array so I can cut it (haven't figured out how to just yet) and install a servo behind it, with a fan blade attached, hooked up to a Parallax basic stamp so I can control the speed of the air passing by the cathode. I'm going to calibrate that set up against a wind meter so I know exactly what speeds the air is moving at.