Sunday, February 3, 2013

What is the highest Voltage ever produced?

Immediately lightning bolt comes to mind.

But then lightning is not 'produced' by man. If you are in the electrical industry, transmission lines knowledge comes in handy. The world's highest substation voltage was proposed in India in 2011 with maximum 1,200kV or 1.2 million volts. That's more than 5,000 times the voltage of your typical home appliances ( refrigerators, lamps, fans, etc)

But that's not the highest voltage ever produced.

nature's torch
Typical voltage of Lightning bolts are between 10 to 120 million volts (10MV - 120MV)
(Long exposure picture taken in Putatan, Sabah)


Highest man-produced voltage

You are right, thinking about the Van de Graaff generator at your secondary school science laboratory.

According to Science Focus magazine, Van de Graaff generators produce the highest voltages. Charge is carried by an insulating belt from a lower electrode to another at the top, accumulating across a metallic dome. They can be strapped together to form tandems for even higher voltages. A tandem at Oak Ridge National Laboratory produced the highest ever at 25.5MV

A megavolt is 1 million volts, or 1,000kV.


5 comments:

AVCr8teur said...

A Van de Graaff generator would have been my guess. Nice photo of lightning. It's not easy to take a photo of it. To answer your question, yes, that is a bird on top of the spaceship sculpture. :)

tehr said...

aku ni bukan dari aliran sains la, bro
tak tahu pulak apa van de graaff generator tu

thomas said...

I wonder when human will be able to harness the power from these lightning bolt and nice capture.

kyo_9 said...

only notice about it after google its image :p

Anonymous said...

wow, such an interesting post. That Van De Graa is brac... dont think i would want to try that experiment :P

J <3