Thermionic Emission in Air

Thermionic Emission in Air It is widely thought that in order to use the thermoionic emission effect, you need to create vacuum or inert gas environment in the respective device. Otherwise, current will have low intensity. However, a couple of years ago Neil Steiner carried out some experiments that showed that heating with a burner instead of a cathode filament produces ionized air flow where the charge requires substantially less voltage amplitude than in vacuum. To illustrate the simplest experiment design, let's take two electrodes. One will be a cathode - it has smaller area; the bigger one will be an anode. Then we connect the anode to the positive wire of 36 V voltage source; after that, we connect the cathode to the negative wire. Then we heat the cathode with the burner until the wire becomes red-hot and incandescent. Now let's read out the current amplitude in the circuit using a milliamperemeter. This will be thermoionic emission current. This feature will open in future opportunities to create an electronic ionic device similar to a vacuum or gas-discharge lamps. But such a device will require no special media for electrodes.

[simonmccauley]

That looks more like a demonstration that flame is a conductor,

[josealainbuenafe]

where can i contact you regarding with this?

[Literacysoft]

Any chance you could give links to Neil Steiner's research?

[theecstatic]

Der...heat and pressure have a relationship....