Student Education Repository (மாணவர்கள் கல்விக் களஞ்சியம்): Today (January 16, 1967) is the Memorial Day of Robert J. Van de Graaff's who is inventor of the Van de Graaff generator.

Saturday, January 16, 2021

Today (January 16, 1967) is the Memorial Day of Robert J. Van de Graaff's who is inventor of the Van de Graaff generator.

Today (January 16, 1967) is the Memorial Day of Robert J. Van de Graaff's who is the inventor of the Van de Graaff generator.

Robert Jemison Van de Graaff was born on December 20, 1901, in the Jemison-Van de Graaff Mansion in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His father was of Dutch descent. His three older brothers Adrian, Hargrove, and William were all All-Southern college football players for the Alabama Crimson Tide. William was known as "Bully" and was Alabama's first All-American. In Tuscaloosa, Robert received his B.S. and master's degrees from The University of Alabama where he was a member of The Castle Club. After a year working for the Alabama Power Company, Van de Graaff studied at the Sorbonne. In 1926, he earned a second B.S. at Oxford University by a Rhodes scholarship, completing his D.Phil. under John Sealy Townsend in 1928.

Van de Graaff was the inventor of the Van de Graaff generator, a device that produces high voltages. In 1929, he developed his first such generator, producing 80,000 volts. By 1933, he had constructed a larger generator generating 7 million volts. Van de Graaff was a National Research Fellow, and from 1931 to 1934 a research associate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became an associate professor in 1934 (staying there until 1960). He was awarded the Elliott Cresson Medal in 1936. During World War II, Van de Graaff was director of the High Voltage Radiographic Project. After World War II, he co-initiated the High Voltage Engineering Corporation (HVAC) with John G. Trump. During the 1950s he invented the insulating-core transformer, producing high-voltage direct current. He also developed tandem generator technology.

The American Physical Society awarded him the T.Bonner prize (1965) for the development of electrostatic accelerators. Van de Graaff generators use a motorized insulating belt (usually made of rubber) to conduct electrical charges from a high voltage source on one end of the belt to the inside of a metal sphere on the other end. Since electrical charge resides on the outside of the sphere, it accumulates to produce an electrical potential much greater than that of the primary high voltage source. Practical limitations restrict the potential produced by large Van de Graaff generators to about 7 million volts. Van de Graaff generators are used primarily as DC power supplies for linear atomic particle accelerators used for nuclear physics experiments. Tandem Van de Graaff generators are essentially two generators in series and can produce about 15 million volts.

The Van de Graaff generator is a simple mechanical device. Small Van de Graaff generators are built by hobbyists and scientific apparatus companies and are used to demonstrate the effects of high DC potentials. Even small hobby machines produce impressive sparks several centimetres long. The largest air-insulated Van de Graaff generator in the world, built by Van de Graaff himself, is operational and is on display in the Boston Museum of Science. Demonstrations during daytimes are a popular attraction. More modern Van de Graaff generators are insulated by pressurized dielectric gas, usually freon or sulfur hexafluoride. During recent years, Van de Graaff generators have been slowly replaced by solid-state DC power supplies without moving parts. The energies produced by Van de Graaff atomic particle accelerators are limited to about 30 MeV, even with tandem generators accelerating doubly charged (for example alpha) particles.

An electrostatic Van de Graaff generator demonstrates radial electric field lines when it is energized with st… | Electric field, Science and nature, Science nature Top 30 Van De Graaff GIFs | Find the best GIF on Gfycat

How a Van de Graaff Generator Works on Make a GIF

More modern particle accelerators using different technology produce much greater energies, thus Van de Graaff particle accelerators have become largely obsolete. They are still used to some extent for graduate student research at colleges and universities and as ion sources for high energy bursts. Van de Graaff passed away on January 16, 1967, in Boston, Massachusetts at the age of 65. A crater on the far side of the moon is named after him.

Source By: Wikipedia

Information: Ramesh, Assistant Professor of Physics, Nehru Memorial College, Puthanampatti.