Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Heart of the Raygun Gothic Rocket Ship: The Uira Engine”.
This is a kinetic sculpture of a rocket ship engine. This was part of the reagan gothic rocket ship, which was here at maker faire last year and is on the embarcadero in san francisco right now, and since it’s not going anywhere for a while, we pulled the engine out of it and brought it here. So we can show it off. Specifically it’s in the floor of the rocket ships. You would climb up into the rock ship and look underneath and you would see these tubes slowly rotating and they fill with a high voltage effect, and so we wanted something that was kinetic and slow moving and high voltage as part of the rocket ship engine. This is all handmade.
I didn’t do the pyrex that was done by a scientific glassblowing company, but the rest of it is it’s a lot of cnc work and some handwork on top of that the slip rings, the high voltage slip rings. Those are all handmade. I was working with a professor of electrical engineering in new zealand, dr wade enright, who works with a phenomenon called a dielectric barrier discharge. It’S basically a capacitive effect that gives you a really beautiful, coronal high voltage discharge. Each one of these tubes is actually a giant capacitor inside these tubes is an aluminum tube wrapped with a very thin very strong insulation called nmn, and it’s incredibly fire resistant heat resistant, incredible dielectric, so there’s an aluminum tube, there’s the dielectric and then there’s this uh Stainless steel wire on top across that whole system we put about 15 kv at about 120 milliamps crank it up and we get a huge potential because electrical potential is in volts per distance. So we’ve got a lot of volts little distance, big potential and it can’t break through the insulation, but it breaks down the air, and so you get these massive electrical discharges on the surface shaped by the wire and while that’s all going on these three very slowly, Rotate and it’s absolutely gorgeous you .