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Coiling Waveforms.




From: 	Malcolm Watts[SMTP:MALCOLM-at-directorate.wnp.ac.nz]
Sent: 	Sunday, August 03, 1997 4:54 PM
To: 	tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
Subject: 	Coiling Waveforms.

Hello All,
             Well I did get around to some coiling last night. I 
scoped waveforms off the running minicoil using a storage 
oscilloscope. I have taken photographs of these waveforms and will 
forward them along with lighted photos of the twins to TCBOR (Richard 
Hull) who have kindly agreed to be a distribution centre for a modest 
cost recovery fee. Should be interesting to those without 
oscilloscopes to see exactly what goes on in a typical running TC.
    Some points of note:

- optimal 1st notch quenching always occurs for the longest attached 
single channel streamers the system produces, either as a single or 
twin system.

- The mica caps are excellent from the low loss point of view. I 
captured an excellent waveform of no breakout conditions showing
multiple beat envelopes (5 - 6) with the _linear_ primary decrement
clearly impressed on the secondary waveform until quenchtime. Gap 
losses are clearly the dominant force in an otherwise good primary. 

- There was absolutely _NO_ difference between secondary waveforms 
captured at 1 BPS and 300+ BPS under identical loading conditions.
In fact, there was so much quiet time between gap fires at 300 BPS 
that expanding the captured waveform out from 1 mS/div to 5uS/div 
showed no clear secondary ring at all (was beyond the y storage 
resolution). Yet, the sparks were there alright :)

- To see the rings etc required high speed timebase settings (e.g. 5 
and 10 uS.div). I would like to say right here: if you believe that 
the secondary gets rung up and up with successive primary shots at 
300 BPS, you are wrong! The gap fires showed up as mere blips on a 
straight line. Still the sparks wax and wane and grow and die. This
is undoubtably an ionic storage/persistence effect.

- Because of the low power involved (33W) I was obviously able to get 
quite close to the system. I took a photo showing the scope just a 
couple of feet away from the coil/s which is where it stayed during
the measurements. Of real interest was the fact that after a few 
seconds repetitive running, my sweatshirt started clinging to my 
chest. ES at work :)

Malcolm