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High speed, high break, Tesla rotary gap
All,
I have followed all of this multiple rotary wheel stuff with amusement.
Tesla had already done this by 1898! He mentions details in the CSN
which confounded and confused Dr. Marinic' (the first annotator of the
notes). Marinic' couldn't quite figure out in his own mind how it
worked. I built a model and saw its brilliance, but it is not for big
sparks. It was more in an attempt to hit near CW operation with a TC.
I put a full demo and disucssion on this with a mechanical model demo on
one of our earliest video report tapes in 1989 or 90. The epitome of
the process is two rotors, one with X number of points and the other
with X+1 points. This is set in stone! The great advantage is the
firing rate per rotation is determined by (X) x (X+1). Thus, wheels
with 4 and 5 electrodes respectively would provide twenty breaks per
rotation and the radial velocity would involve the summation of the two
counter-rotating motor speeds. It is abysmally easy to achieve 2500
breaks per second with this arrangement!
The two wheels are, of course, counter rotated with the rims of the
gaps NOT SLIP RINGED, but arced to by yet another set of input points.
This is how the power is commutated to the rotors without slip rings to
burn up! Rotor edges are going to be real tough to burn up! Needless
to say, insulation is ultra-important, but not insuperable. Tesla did
it with the crappy insulation of his time. It is a snap today.
The best method and one which was actually implemented by Fred Glessner
of the Northwest Tesla coil builders after seeing my report tape, was to
float metal disks on insulated hubs on two motors facing each other.
Before all you little Teslaphiles go scampering off to your lathes, I
showed one of Fred's return videos of his gap built from our earlier
taped discussion on a subsequent Tesla report video tape, and the thing
really chews into NSTs and homemade capacitors!!! It blew up everything
he had!!!!! It fired too fast! Quenched too well! Produced little
spark with big caps. When cap and power matched, It behaved like a
tube coil....virtually no spark and tons of RF field energy. This was
to be expected.
Nice idea, but Tesla never used it again. (neither did Fred!) It
limited his need for showmanship. He did apply it to some small RF
systems however.
Richard Hull, TCBOR