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Re: Richmond Teslathon

The weather was a little sticky Saturday, but everything else was just 
great.  Richard Hull showed off his water gun research where a special 
(==expensive) "no-inductance" capacitor that discharged 300 Joules 
through a few drops of pure H2O will blow nice round holes in .25" 
plywood and can fire a small .5" plastic ball at speeds up to 230m/s.  
The neat thing about this is that the measured energy output from this 
"gun" is about 130% to 150% of the input energy! Richard is working 
with investigators from MIT and Oxford on this project, but a definitive 
paper has not yet been produced.  The MIT water expert thinks that the 
extra energy might be coming from the water's latent heat of 
vaporization that is reclaimed when the water is essentially blown into 
a vapor in microseconds by the force of the plasma arc.

I also got to meet Tesla mailing list member Ed Harris who drove in 
from Ohio, and saw the tape of his work with argon gas discharges at 
atmospheric pressure.  30 Watts from a flyback transformer never 
looked so good!  

Question for Ed:

Have you tried to seal the Ar gas in the frame, and if not, why not?  Is 
Argon gas difficult to seal in, or is there some other reason that you 
keep the gas flowing in slowly and the purge hole open?


Steven Roys (sroys-at-radiology.ab.umd.edu)