[Corvettaholic]

So while I was floating down the salt river last weekend, I was thinking about our discussion about using piezo-electric crystals on the body to generate power. So I got to thinking, tasers are neat too. I googled a bit on piezo-electrics and found that quartz can generate some really high voltages, and I saw pictures of the sparks that grill igniters can generate. So why not make a taser out of it?

Basically, you'd have a big fat mouse trap thingy. Put a big sheet of quartz at one end, and thwack the snot out of it with a springloaded arm. There's some mechanical stress for you! Have the positive and negative ends go to two prongs. I don't think you can get 500kV out of a single piezoelectric crystal, so thats why you need a bunch of them. Pull back one lever to cock back 10 modified mousetraps, pull trigger to release mousetraps once the business end of the taser is in contact with something or someone. Think it'll work?

But as usual I have a couple questions! So how do you determine the positive and negative end of a crystal? Is it dependent on shape, or where the stress is applied? I read some recipe on how to make your own rochelle salt, which is supposed to be great for higher voltages, but that ends up in some lumpy cube-ish shape. Also, where would I get a sheet of quartz? Any idea on how thick it should be so the high-tension-spring-modified-mousetrap doesn't shatter it?

[Borek]

Pull back one lever to cock back 10 modified mousetraps, pull trigger to release mousetraps once the business end of the taser is in contact with something or someone. Think it'll work?

I doubt you will be able to release all mousetraps with such accuracy that they will all hit at exactly the same moment (that was one of the enginering problems with the early atomic bomb designs if I recall correctly).

Perhaps one even larger mousetrap will do the trick of instant hit

[Corvettaholic]

So have all the quartz sheets layed out in a ring pattern, with all the 'zap' electrodes in a central tube. Have an outer ring slam down on the inner ring of quartz sheets. Won't be a mousetrap anymore, but more like a centrifugal clutch kind of thing. Since all the output voltages from the quartz crystals need to be added up, connect all the outputs in series? Or have each output go to a capacitor bank, so you can slap the crystals around until you build up enough of a charge then dump the stored capacitor charge into something.

Who here has a lot of knowledge on piezoelectric stuff? I'm really foggy on the electrical properties of it, like where the positive/negative terminals are supposed to be. Also, can I treat like a battery? Lets break it down real simple like: have a crystal, and a light bulb in the circuit. Just pretend the crystal puts out enough wattage to power the light bulb even though I know it won't. So you spank the crystal with the hammer, and voltage comes out of the negative terminal, flows through the load (light bulb), and returns to the positive side of the crystal. Complete circuit. If I added multiple crystals to that circuit, the output voltage from one crystal would cause the next crystal in line to distort and not put out voltage. Problem. So if all crystals are in parallel, the voltages won't be added together. Problem. Thats why I'm thinking of a capacitive storage system, and just stick all the capacitors in the central tube. Make sure everything is insulated real good with epoxy or something, because I don't want to lose any power to corona...