Why won't my homemade capacitor work!?

Question

I built it with 3 cards ( the ones used to play go fish ) and 2 pieces of aluminium.They are in this order card, foil, card, foil, and card.They are sandwitched together and the foil isn't glued it's taped with duct tape.I connected a wire to each piece of foil and then to a battery.Left it there for 2 min. and took the battery off .WITHOUT TOUCHING the wires.THEN....I tuched the wires without the bat. and didn't feel anything.What's wrong?At this point anything will help :-(--)---(

Answer 1

In theory your description should work. Here are a couple possibilities:

1) The "plates" are too small to achieve a charge that you'll feel.

2) The duct tape is conductive and shorting out the foil plates.

Try using sheets of newspaper or saran-wrap as the dielectric between large pieces of aluminum foil. Lay sheets of saran-wrap, foil, saran-wrap, and foil on top of one another in that order. Then roll up the package. See photo at link below.

Answer 2

The capacitor you built is probably around 50 picoFarads (pF). That means it will charge up within a nanosecond of touching it to the battery. Even if you charged it to 500V, you wouldn't get a shock by touching it. You'll get more of a shock from scooting across the carpet. But your dielectric (the insulating material between the plates) would probably break down well before reaching 500V. I don't recommend trying that. You can buy a much better quality capacitor than you can make.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor

Answer 3

You should try connecting a high impedance multimeter across the capacitor and then let it charge. You will see the voltage on the meter of course. Then disconnect the power source. You should see a slight delay in the loss of voltage across the capacitor as it discharges through the multimeter. This delay that you see is caused by your capacitor.

Answer 4

first of all, that is a very crude capacitor, you can't expect it to work very well. It will definitly have some capacitance, but i don't know how much. Second, how powerfull is the battery you are using? Can you feel anything if you just touch across the battery? If not you definitly wont feel anything across the capacitor

Answer 5

Your capacitor, while AWESOMELY BUILT, is not big enought to store a charge which you can actually feel.

Go buy/borrow a cheap voltmeter and you will be able to measure something however!

have fun

Answer 6

Maybe the battery voltage is low DC that is why you couldn't feel it. Used the voltmeter to measure the charged voltage on your capacitor.

Answer 7

There are very little charges.

Answer 8

To get a Flux capacitor to work you need 1.21 jigawatts of electricity. 1.21 jigawatts!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!