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Magnetic Quenching of Spark Gaps
From: Greg Leyh[SMTP:lod-at-pacbell-dot-net]
Sent: Sunday, September 21, 1997 5:08 AM
To: Tesla List
Subject: Re: Magnetic Quenching of Spark Gaps
Jason Judd wrote:
> A friend of mine had the idea to put a turn of the primary around the spark
> gap so as the spark gap breaks down the magnetic field created would help
> quench the gap. I haven't heard of anyone trying this yet though.
>
> Ideas ?
That's a great idea, except that you really want the quenching to occur
when the primary current is zero.
The objective of quenching is to evacuate the inter-electrode area of all
ions and free electrons, _after_ the first beat envelope decays to zero.
During the beat envelope, the operation of the gap should not be molested,
in order to minimize gap losses.
One way to do this is with permanent magnets -- although the magnets need to
be mounted on the rotor, and localized just after the electrode.
Stationary magnets placed around the gap would do nothing, of course,
since the field lines must be _moving_ relative to the charged particles
in order to clear them (F = qvB).
Perhaps a set of smaller auxillary contacts could be mounted on the main rotor
of the gap, which are positioned to fire _just after_ the main contacts open.
The auxillary contacts would discharge the energy stored in a small capacitor
into an electromagnetic coil set, mounted above and below the main gap area.
This "clearing" capacitor and coil would be chosen to provide a high current,
short duration pulse which is just sufficient to clear the charged particles
out of the inter-electrode area. With a suitable arrangement of steering diodes,
the unspent energy from the clearing pulse could be reclaimed for the next cycle.
-GL