Most of us have experienced a shock while touching a door handle specially during winter and some of you may have seen what happens when you rub a plastic scale or a balloon against our dry hair to attract tiny pieces of paper.
Would you like to explore what happens there behind the shock and the attraction of tiny pieces of paper?
To explore this we propose this nice challenge: to make an electroscope.
An electroscope is very simple and crude instrument to detect a charge on an object.
Below is an aluminum foil leaf electroscope build in Gnowledge Lab.
So the challenge is to build your own Electroscope, play around it and explore the kind of charges and its effect on the leaves.
Also, explore and report the followings:
Try to detect the charges using a scale in different environments such as humid and dry.
Change the aluminum foil leaf with different material leaf (such as paper, different kinds of cloth, plastic, etc) and observe which all materials leaf will work and try to investigate why.
Moist the Bottle from inside and observe weather the electroscope will detect charges or not and investigate why.
Change the copper wire with other conductive material and observe electroscope working.
Report your work done and achievements through pictures, messages, and videos below this post.
While you are making whatever questions you have, whenever you need help, do not hesitate to ask by replying to this topic.
Some References to know more about how to get things done
Experimented with bare metal wire, aluminium foil, a holding base made up of two different materials (plastic file holder (red one) , and the cardboard strip)
Materials
Working
Tried this one,
Fig
Setup
Deflection
1
Charged scale brought near the wire
Al strips got deflected
2
With same setup as that of Fig 1, momentarily touch the wire
Deflection was nullified -> Al strips were closed
3
Without scale in vicinity
Deflection was observed without the presence of scale
4
Bringing scale near again
Deflection was nullified in presence of charged scale(huh strange isn’t it?)
(The above are few observations for us to ponder! Why do you think the model is behaving this way?)
The electroscope is the precursor to measuring voltage. One method of measurement was to focus a beam of light on the leaf so that after reflection it fell on a wall. The leaf deflection would then deflect the light beam allowing measurement of the intensity.
It has been a magnificent march from a leaf electroscope to a modern digital multimeter, measuring the same simple phenomena but providing myriad interpretations - voltage, current, capacitance, resistance, transistor gain.
This is my version of electroscope. I used a spice bottle which already had gap on its cap to introduce the wire into the bottle…
The challenge before me was to find the wire. Due to lockdown I couldn’t buy a thick wire. But instead I used jumper wires used in electronics (which I already had). I bonded four wires together at the top end and the bottom end which effectively increased the cross sectional area and was equivalent to a single thick wire. The amazing part was …it only took 10 minutes to make the electroscope.
I made this electroscope with an objective to sustain the deflection even without a charged object near it. This was something I couldn’t achieve while doing an experiment on determining the charge on the pith balls. Through, the discussion during the Vigyan Pratibha session it was brought to my notice that I didn’t follow the step of discharging while performing the experiment. So this time I could achieve that.
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