Experiment
In a typical experiment, two 100 mL beakers are filled with deionized water to roughly 3 mm below the edge of the beaker, and exposed the water to 15 kV direct current, with one beaker turning negative, and the other positive. After building up electric charge, the water then spontaneously rises along the thread over the glass walls and forms a "water bridge" between them. When one beaker is slowly pushed away from the other, the structure remains. When the voltage rises to 25 kV, the structure can be pulled apart as far as 25 millimetres (0.98 in). If the thread is very short, then the force of the water may be strong enough to push the thread from the positive glass into the negative glass.
The water generally travels from anode to cathode, but the direction may vary due to the different surface charge that builds up at the water bridge surface, which will generate electrical shear stresses of different signs. The bridge breaks into droplets due to capillary action when the beakers are pulled apart at a critical distance, or the voltage is reduced to a critical value.
The bridge needs clean, deionized water to be formed, and its stability is dramatically reduced as ions are introduced into the liquid (by either adding salt or from electrochemical reactions at the electrode surface).
Read more about this topic: Water Thread Experiment
Famous quotes containing the word experiment:
“What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men—each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature—are shot down wholesale.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“Mathematics alone make us feel the limits of our intelligence. For we can always suppose in the case of an experiment that it is inexplicable because we don’t happen to have all the data. In mathematics we have all the data ... and yet we don’t understand. We always come back to the contemplation of our human wretchedness. What force is in relation to our will, the impenetrable opacity of mathematics is in relation to our intelligence.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.... Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?”
—James Madison (1751–1836)