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Re: How should we measure coil efficiency
From: Malcolm Watts[SMTP:MALCOLM-at-directorate.wnp.ac.nz]
Sent: Monday, July 21, 1997 10:29 PM
To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
Subject: Re: How should we measure coil efficiency
Hi all,
My two cent's worth on this topic. I am simply after the
longest and hottest possible discharges for a _known_ primary power
which is _easily_ and accurately measured as Ec x BPS. For a sync or
static gap system this is very well defined. For an async, scoping
using a HV probe can give an adjusted figure or a mean consumption
figure depending on whether one wishes to extract peak based
performance or mean power performance.
Forget the transformer type I say and forget transformer losses
in the gap. I know that this makes wallplug figures meaningless but
let's face it, they are largely meaningless anyway. If we are to
extract any meaningful figure of merit for different coils we simply
have to know as accurately as possible just how much power is going
into the primary. Failure to do this in the past has led to rules of
thumb for power vs length that have been counterclaimed one after the
other by actual working coil designs.
I am not interested in how far a coil can throw sparks to a
ground rod with a 100mph gale blowing around it. I am interested in
how far it can demonstrably reach (even just 10% of runtime) and
connect under favourable conditions. One of the magical qualities of
Tesla Coils is the ability "to reach out where no induction coil can
go". Let's use that quality and impress the hell out of the
neighbours.
BTW, congratulations to Bert Pool for his latest magnifier
experiments.
What do others think?
Malcolm