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Donner und Blitzen
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From: L.Robertson [SMTP:LWRobertson-at-email.msn-dot-com]
Sent: Sunday, February 22, 1998 10:40 PM
To: Tesla Builders
Subject: Donner und Blitzen
Hi all ... long time - no post.
All the talk about lightning bolts, death rays and
BIG capacitors got me to thinking.
Why not put a jolly big pulse discharge capacitor
between the bottom of the secondary and ground.
Charge it up to many tens of kV, then crank up the
coil as usual. Any ionization path to ground ought
to benefit from the energy stored in the big cap.
I rationalized that if the big cap had a frequency
response faster than the coil frequency, capacitve
division should protect it from voltage breakthrough.
So I put my 2uF 60 kV Aerovox to that duty.
Initial low power testing with six inches of spark,
but no charge on the big cap revealed an interesting
phenomenon. If the toroid was shorted to ground, nothing
happened. When no spark was present, again nada.
When spark was present though, a slow but steady charge
built up on the Aerovox. 20 seconds of spark would
produce about 5000 volts of DC on the capacitor.
This was configured as a classical AC Tesla Coil,
so where this rectified current is coming from
I do not know. Possibly the electrostatic phenomena
reported on this list stems from the same source.
Further reflection led me to postpone the experiment
until I find a safer place than my basement to do it.
The 2 kJ that can be stored in the Aerovox could do
some real damage with an unintended strike, not to
mention being most likely lethal.
Scheming to produce bigger sparks
in soggy Morgan Hill ....
LR