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Re: Capacitor C/Peek
Re:
"Connecting anything to the secondary terminal of a Tesla coil will lower the
voltage and give an erroneous voltage reading. A better method would be to
measure the electric field which Breit, Tuve, and Dahl did with their 5
million volt coil in the 1930's as shown in the Tesla Coil Construction
Guide."
Connecting something to the terminal will add capacitance,
although very little if it is a low-capacitance probe. Problem
with trying to measure the electrical field is that the effect of
the ion cloud due to the discharge will distort it badly, almost
certainly giving high readings. There is a description of a
measurement scheme in
an article in TCBA NEWS Volume 6, #2, 1987, pp 9-11. It concerns
a very large Tesla coil designed for insulation testing. They
have what appears to be a huge oblate sitting above the upper
terminal in a region which might not be affected by discharges
which they confine to another place in the lab . Such a situation
would not prevail in most of our setups where we have a coil
merrily shooting its streamers all over the place.
Ed Phillips