You can easily decorate your home with a variety of table, wall or floor lamps. At the same time, they can act as bright design elements or be invisible from the outside.
But in any case, the lighting fixtures in the house must match the existing interior of the room. Otherwise, their light or simply their presence will introduce disharmony into the style, which will clearly be a negative outcome of your idea.
Today, many people use such unusual lamps as plasma ball lamps as a decorative element.
Plasma ball lamp
This lamp has an unusual appearance and creates a non-standard type of light. Therefore, such an acquisition will serve as an excellent decorative element, but only if its choice and placement in the room was competent. Our article will be devoted to this issue today.
History of creation
The world owes the appearance of such an unusual lighting device as a plasma ball lamp to the world-famous inventor Nikola Tesla.
Nikola Tesla
It was Tesla, who became famous for his experiments with electricity, who built the sulfur lamp back in the 19th century. Based on this device, the first decorative lamps of this type later appeared.
Note! Today, there are not only plasma lamps, but also spotlights and other lamps designed for public lighting. However, they are not yet very widespread in the world due to their rather complex design.
Now, after a short historical excursion is completed, we can understand in more detail the structure of such an unusual lamp.
Features of the structure of a plasma lamp
A plasma ball lamp is a specific lamp. The lampshade is round and transparent, and inside the sphere the real “magic” happens.
Numerous plasma discharges extend from the center of the lamp to the periphery of the transparent shade, which fascinate with their bright tints and curves, which defy prediction and seem to live their own life.
We can say that in appearance such a lamp resembles the prediction ball of a gypsy fortune teller, giving instructions to those who can read them.
Note! A plasma ball lamp will be an excellent replacement for a night light in a children's room.
Plasma lamp as a night light
Thanks to such an unusual and magical appearance, such a “plasma” will give a lot:
- will give an atmosphere of mystery and unusualness;
- will become an exotic design element;
- The lamp is capable of normalizing human mental activity, relieving stress and fatigue;
- and in general, this will become an original highlight of the interior, which can not be found in every house or apartment.
It is worth noting that, unlike standard lighting fixtures, a plasma ball lamp will be an unusual and original birthday gift. So, a plasma lamp is a transparent ball on a stand, inside of which energy discharges beat. They are able to respond to human touches to a transparent sphere or even a voice.
Note! Plasma discharges inside the lamp are similar to small fireworks enclosed in a glass spherical “trap”.
Lamp response to touch
When you touch such a lamp, discharges inside it begin to flow to the place touched by the finger. This is a very beautiful sight that can mesmerize for many hours.
This item looks more like an element from a science fiction movie than a lamp.
To achieve this effect, modern technologies are used, which allows us to achieve high quality of these lighting products.
The principle of operation of a plasma ball
A plasma ball lamp has an electrode at its core, which allows it to create plasma discharges inside a transparent sphere. The operating principle of the device is as follows:
- high alternating voltage, characterized by a frequency of approximately 30 kHz, reaches the electrode;
- the sphere of the lamp inside contains rarefied gas;
Note! To fill the sphere, various gas mixtures can be used, which will differ in the color characteristics of the generated plasma discharges. They can have blue, pink, yellow, green, crimson and other colors.
Plasma discharge lamp color option
- Due to the voltage applied to the electrode in the gas vapor, plasma discharges are formed.
The lamp itself, operating on this principle, will consume little electricity (approximately 5-10 W). Therefore, if you treat it correctly, it will last for decades. We will talk about how such a device should be monitored in the next section.
Features of the plasma ball operation
In order for your “plasma” to bring you joy and peace for many years, it needs proper care, which includes the following:
- Do not place any metal objects on the lamp. Often, out of curiosity, coins of various denominations are placed on the sphere. Even a small coin can cause an electric shock. In this case, the sphere itself may burst and release discharges that are no longer so beautiful and safe;
- the lamp must be connected to a 220 V power supply. You can also use a USB port to power it (if available). You can connect this connector yourself if you have an old model of lamp;
- The lamp operating time should not exceed more than two hours. Otherwise, this may lead to overheating, and this will negatively affect the strength of the transparent flask and may subsequently lead to a violation of its tightness.
Note! If the operating rules for plasma lamps are violated, the discharges generated by them can escape beyond the transparent sphere. And you won’t be able to fix the lamp yourself.
As you can see, the rules are more than simple and understandable. The main thing here is to ensure that children, who will invariably be attracted by plasma discharges, do not damage the sphere with gas and do not release “fireworks” outside.
Plasma lamp equipment
Modern ball lamps, which form plasma discharges inside themselves, contain:
- the plasma lamp itself. Modern models must have a USB connector. For models, you can make such a connector yourself by cutting off the plug for the socket and connecting USB to it from the old cord. Just before carrying out such work yourself, make sure that the USB connector is working properly;
- USB cable. This is a mandatory element of all modern models;
- user manual. Using the instructions, you will be able to find out all the nuances and subtleties of the device’s operation, the possibility of repairing it yourself, as well as other important points given by manufacturers.
Plasma lamp set
When buying such a lamp, you must make sure that the lamp (especially the transparent sphere) is in good working order. Its transparent part should not be damaged, scratched or cracked. If there are any, be sure to request a replacement product. Typically, a lighting device has the following technical characteristics:
- power supply – 220 V (standard);
- power - 8 W;
- manufacturing materials: plastic, glass and electronic components.
The technical characteristics of the lamp must be indicated both on the packaging and in the instructions for it. When purchasing a plasma lamp, you need to know that the diameter of its spherical bulb can vary over a fairly wide range (from 8 to 20 cm).
Appearance Options
Despite the fact that a ball lamp that creates plasma discharges will always have a spherical bulb and a standard design, its appearance can be decorated in various ways.
Decorative plasma lamp
Additional decor will help to fit the lamp more harmoniously into the interior of the room, while avoiding the risk of style mismatch.
Note! Such a lamp can be decorated, for example, as a dragon, which will cover the ball with its wings and tail, making it less expressive against the general background of the lamp design. Moreover, such decor will not affect the attractiveness of the ball and its plasma discharges as a whole.
Therefore, when choosing a plasma lamp, it is imperative to take into account its appearance, because a regular spherical lamp may not fit most interior styles used in the modern world.
Lamp with discharges and interior
Installing a plasma lamp in a house or apartment will be an excellent solution for the following reasons:
- the lamp is compact in size and fits well on both a shelf and a coffee table;
- the ability to decorate the appearance of the device expands the list of styles into which it can harmoniously fit without violating the overall design;
- This is an excellent night light that can create an atmosphere of mystery and fairy tales; the lamp helps relieve irritation, fatigue and stress.
This is not a toy made from a light bulb and a liner, or even an evacuated cone of air. My old dream of making a real, classic, slightly less than completely homemade plasma ball has finally come true. Technologies were invented, materials were found, and, finally, a working sample was made from a chemical round-bottomed flask. Plasma balls as such were first invented and made in the USA in the mid-eighties by a certain Bill Parker, called “Light Sculptures” and quite actively produced by his company in a variety of extremely colorful designs, and the compositions of most gas mixtures never left the limits of the head of Bill Parker himself . What is now on the market is a Chinese standardized burp that cannot be compared to his masterpieces. More impressive (relative to Chinese) devices are made by Strattman’s team and chemist Mike Davis, but the former have exorbitant prices, and the latter fundamentally does not sell them. And, although I don’t have the resources to create glass spheres, I tried to at least get closer to Bill’s creations using the means possible in my home lab. In a nutshell, the essence of my homemade plasma ball is very simple: we take a large chemical glass flask, solder a central electrode and a rod into its neck (a narrow tube through which pumping is done from the working volume and which melts when the vacuum device is unsoldered from the pump), we pump out the air, let in the required gas mixture, unsolder it and connect a high-voltage high-frequency source. In fact, there are a lot of difficulties and nuances that I will try to explain, since I have never seen decent instructions of this kind anywhere on the Internet.
1. Working with glass.
Glass is a very unusual material for those who have not tried to work with its liquid phase. There are quite a lot of good books on glassblowing, and for those who want to try their hand, you can study the materials from them well. When applying to a plasma ball, we need two items: a glass tube and a spherical chemical flask ( important: an exact match of glass brands is necessary! If the flask is Pyrex, then the tube is the same, if the flask is “yellow” (molybdenum glass, say, C52), then the tube too. Otherwise, cracking when cooling and failure of the whole job is almost inevitable), and as tools - graphite sticks approximately 5-6 mm in diameter, long-nosed pliers, a good propane torch (a full-weight propane cylinder of at least 5 liters is required: all disposable small cylinders are not suitable due to the requirements for gas flow and cooling of the cylinder as a result), capable of heating a sufficiently large working area and a hydrogen burner, without which I most likely would not have been able to cope at all (I don’t know how orthodox glassblowers work without it, making do with a mixture of natural gas and oxygen).
Working with glass, including the manufacture of electric vacuum devices, is described in some detail in some books, for example in “Technique of Laboratory Experiments”. I recommend it to anyone interested in studying it.
First you need to make a central electrode. We take a tube (I have a standard 15 mm diameter) and at maximum burner operating mode, melt a drop at its end and blow it out (with the mouth of the head) into a small ball, 2-3 times larger than the diameter of the tube. For details of the process, I can only suggest turning to books on glassblowing and to your own practice. Then a ball of steel wool or washcloth is pushed into the ball and filled with silver powder, which adheres to the glass and ensures an even distribution of the corona discharge. The next operation is to narrow the throat of the flask. we need to narrow it to such an extent that it wraps around the central electrode tube and at the same time there is room for the rod. The best way that I could come up with: the flask is clamped in a stand perpendicular to the flame of the burner, turned on at full power, and rotated as it narrows, and the edges, softened by the flame, are wrapped with a wrapper inside using pliers. When the diameter of the hole approaches the diameter of the previously made ball, the fun begins: you need to solder the glass of the flask around the glass of the electrode without bending it, melting it or damaging it. I did this: I took a second tripod, into which I attached a graphite rod, inserted into the electrode (graphite is not wetted by glass and can be removed without restraint), and necessary to ensure that the electrode does not bend when it is heated and soldered, and as accurately as I could, I verified the alignment of the ball in the middle of the large flasks, after which he simply heated both the electrode and the neck of the flask together, covering up the gaps and holes using a hydrogen torch, which strongly liquefies the glass, and pliers. Shortly before the end of the sealing process, it is necessary to solder the plug - another piece of the tube of the same glass, through which air will be pumped out and gas will be injected, and which will be sealed off during the final sealing of the ball. This is done either in weight using a hydrogen torch, or by securing it in a tripod - the latter option allows you to twitch less during the process - the rod does not try to float and bend - but is more confusing.
After finishing the soldering work, we make sure that there are no holes, especially microscopic ones. I had the most trouble with this: they can be completely invisible in liquefied glass, but they will show themselves during pumping and you will have to warm everything up again and seal them. Then we anneal the junction to relieve stress in the glass (I again refer you to books for theoretical foundations, but I did this: turn on the propane burner to the smoking flame mode, and hold the junction in it for about 3-5 minutes, after which I wrap it tightly in kaolin wool and let cool down naturally. Cotton wool is needed for thermal insulation and to ensure that there is no air blowing, which will cool the glass too quickly). The result should be something like this: a clumsy, soot-covered and scary-looking, but vacuum-resistant and sealed glass junction of two tubes and a flask, with one of the tubes (the side one) going into the volume of the flask, and the second - into the glass isolated from it central electrode ball.
2. Working with vacuum (you can read more in a separate article at the link).
Before injecting gases, air must be removed from the resulting not yet plasma ball.
Unfortunately, you can immediately forget about water-jet pumps and refrigerator compressors: they are not enough to ensure gas purity, which is critical. But not everything is so complicated; for a ball with xenon or krypton filling, a high-quality forevacuum unit of type 2NVR-5D (perhaps even a Chinese one, type Z-1.5, will be enough, but, most likely, you will have to flush the flask with gas, wasting it in order to achieve the required purity): it pumps out to almost 5*10^-2 torr, while the operating pressure of xenon/krypton in the ball is tens of torr. But, generally speaking, it is necessary to connect a turbomolecular or diffusion pump and pump out the ball until a deep vacuum (discharge disappears). Vacuum technology is an even more tricky area than glassblowing, and I’m unlikely to be able to talk about it better than it is done in specialized publications, so I’ll refrain from detailed descriptions of the scheme: those who have an idea of the hardware, types of components and features of the technology will be able to do everything themselves For those without, the description will not bring any benefit, and will only give rise to a lot of new questions, so I will do the same as chemists do when describing reactions, and simply use a lot of keywords in the description.
My vacuum post uses a 2NVR-5DM as a fore-vacuum pump and a glass fungal pump (I quickly switched from a glass one to a high-quality Edwards EO50 with air cooling) on polyphenyl ether as a diffusion pump.
The connection is made with vacuum hoses (thick rubber), between the pumps there are metal valves, stainless steel + fluoroplastic (the hose goes directly to Edwards). A devious input is soldered into the differential pump (attached through quick-release manifold connections with a high-quality large-section valve), to which a stainless bellows is soldered (attached through the same standard quick-release connections) (any rubber will be contaminated by the pumped-out substances and then crap into the entire system, not allowing you to achieve at least as much something like a deep vacuum), ending with another tap (an UltraTorr type connection that is delightful in its convenience. I highly recommend it). There is no metrology as such (calibrated according to VIT-2 with PMT-4M and PMI-2), all measurements are carried out based on the position of the PFE ring in the differential pump nozzle (the degree and nature of the glow of the discharge in the tube from the pump, which allows measuring the depth with an accuracy of an order of magnitude vacuum up to 10^-5 torr) and the nature of the discharge from the RF generator in the pumped volume. The basic principles of working with a vacuum are a) it is slow, b) it gases almost everything (exceptions are high-quality stainless steel, for example), c) it is much easier to let in air than to pump it out, d), the most important thing: the pump does not “suck in” gas molecules, like it may seem that he just does not let them through in the opposite direction. Therefore, it is necessary to provide all the conditions for them to get inside the pump: tubes as wide as possible, gas heating, clean oil in the differential pump and forevac, etc. and so on. To control the vacuum level, I recommend using a high-frequency field source if there are no good calibrated vacuum gauges and accessories for them. The best one is the Kacher. 3. Working with electronics.
The main task is to provide high voltage, high frequency and not very high power. This is ideally handled by a conventional single-cycle 555 generator with a line switch at the output of the field switch, there’s just one problem: to achieve a high voltage in this circuit, the resonant mode of the line switch is required, and the resonance must be achieved at frequencies of hundreds of kilohertz in order to provide beautiful discharges in the ball. This problem has not yet been solved, and we have to make do with relatively low frequencies - about 30-40 kHz. At worst, you can just make a blocking generator or a multivibrator, but I am flattering myself with the hope that the reader who has already managed to get to the point of powering the ball can make a gene on a 555 timer on his own
