High Voltage for Extreme Ozone

Don’t you hate it when making your DIY X-ray machine you make an uncomfortable amount of ozone gas? No? Well [Hyperspace Pirate] did, which made him come up with an …read more

May 22, 2025 - 10:10

Grid overlayed onto a mason jar. Across the grid are high voltage purple coronas.

Don’t you hate it when making your DIY X-ray machine you make an uncomfortable amount of ozone gas? No? Well [Hyperspace Pirate] did, which made him come up with an interesting idea. While creating a high voltage supply for his very own X-ray machine, the high voltage corona discharge produced a very large amount of ozone. However, normally ozone is produced using lower voltage, smaller gaps, and large surface areas. Naturally, this led [Hyperspace Pirate] to investigate if a higher voltage method is effective at producing ozone.

Using a custom 150kV converter, [Hyperspace Pirate] was able to test the large gap method compared to the lower voltage method (dielectric barrier discharge). An ammonia reaction with the ozone allowed our space buccaneer to test which method was able to produce more ozone, as well as some variations of the designs.

Experimental setup with two mason jars hooked up from ozone production to nitrate — Experimental Setup with ozone production in the left jar and nitrate in the right.

Large 150kV gaps proved slightly effective but with no large gains, at least not compared to the dielectric barrier method. Of which, glass as the dielectric leads straight to holes, and HTPE gets cooked, but in the end, he was able to produce a somewhat sizable amount of ammonium nitrate. The best design included two test tubes filled with baking soda and their respective electrodes. Of course, this comes with the addition of a very effective ozone generator.

While this project is very thorough, [Hyperspace Pirate] himself admits the extreme dangers of high ozone levels, even getting close enough to LD50 levels for worry throughout out his room. This goes for when playing with high voltage in general kids! At the end of the day even with potential asthma risk, this is a pretty neat project that should probably be left to [Hyperspace Pirate]. If you want to check out other projects from a distance you should look over to this 20kW microwave to cook even the most rushed meals!

Thanks to [Mahdi Naghavi] for the Tip!