As I described in the paint's pigment particle dispersion blog entry, the agitation of the liquid can be done with any type of energy. This particular article is about agitation of the paint by inducing a high voltage electric field of 20 kilo-volt. The field is created by a small generator that can be bought on sites like Ebay. A photo of the device is seen below.
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| High voltage field generator surrounded by paint bottles - 1 |
The black rectangular object in the middle is the electrical field generator. on its top to the right is a rotor that spins without any mechanical drive. It is propelled entirely by the electrical field. Move your hand too close to it and an arc of sparks will be built between your finger and the tips of the rotor. It is an indication that a lot of energy is established in its immediate vicinity, to which hopefully particles in the paint will react in a way that will improve its handling. Below this paragraph you see short video clip of the set-up from a different angle in that gives a better view of the rotor.
Around the generator I placed 5 bottles of Holbein Aeroflash acrylic paint. The brown paint bottle (visible in the front on the right side) is fitted with a double string of neodymium magnets. I opted to test agitation with an electrical field first, because it is less messy than exposing paint to an ultrasonic field, in which paint has to be in direct contact with a ceramic disk that is vibrating at 1.7 Megahertz. I will see what the paint does after being exposed to the high voltage electrical field after 24 hours (to start with). Stay tuned to see test results.
Note: I actually get higher voltage readings when measuring the field with my multimeter - earthing one probe while holding the other close to the spinning rotor - than is supplied to the generator.... 12 volt goes into the device and my meter reads pulsating peak values between 18.x and 19.x volts each time a rotor blade flies by... Interesting...
