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Ionized gases (fwd)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 19 Jul 1998 17:55:46 -0400
From: Richard Hull <rhull-at-richmond.infi-dot-net>
To: Tesla List <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
Subject: Ionized gases
All,
Without a good idea and feel for the theory and science behind ionized
gases, all the guess work about this Ctop crap just falls into limbo and
so much BS.
A good text to touch on would be Von Engels, Ionized Gases, He treats
one to an old school method of teaching the theory first and then the
moment he finishes the equations, blows holes in what you were just
taught with the old hands on imperative, school of hard knocks,
explanation that this or that law fails miserably unless all parameters
are rigidly fixed (as in a sealed chamber at known pressure and with a
fixed single gas,etc). He seems to delite in noting here and there that
the theory will differ with physical results by one or two orders of
magnitude if applied to unusually complex situations. His approach to
the study of the theory of ionized gases is a wonderfully honest, open,
instructive and pleasing experience.
Now, let us say we are using a break rate of 300/sec. This is certainly
neither slow nor fast for, say, a 10KW system. Nemesis and many of the
TCBOR magnifiers exhibited single arc attachments lasting as long as 1
second! (I got 'em on video as proof!). That is 300 channel locked
discharges spaced ~3ms apart.
At atmospheric pressure, the life time of an ion is very short for
reasons you can look up. It is normally considered to be milliseconds.
However, in a hot arc channel trillions of ions are formed and many can
last large fractions of a second. A lot of this is due to special
electrostatic field conditions lengthening their life times by outer
orbital dynamics.
Once the coil rings up the first, second or even the hundreth time and
the arc is struck, ions are always present to affect every ringup there
after by massively altering the gas surrounding the system. The
visible arcs are just a causitive agent and are not associated with why
the coil actually changes frequency or is loaded or whatever you wish to
ascribe to the reason for the shift in Fo. The gas environment created
by the arcs rules the process. A process that is, non-linear,
uncontrollable and unknowable on the instantaneous level. There are
single, double, and tripley ionized monatomic gas atoms. There are
excited diatomic molecules. There are fast ions, slow ions, fast and
slow neutrals, and metastable atoms of three different gases! Water
molecules have been broken down and hydrogen nuclei are also present.
So much energy is available, new gases and compounds are formed NOx,
ozone, H2O2, etc. All are in a seething mass of turbulent neutral
gas. Most every thing in or even near the arc channel is highly
conductive even during the entire dead time of the gap. This is why the
long arcs to a grounded object can hang for a while. The channel never
really dies, until some as yet unknown quenching action occurs.
This magical using up of the channel gases, thermal or electrostatic
barrier condition or whatever, is much more fascinating to me than all
the other issues around a running system. I have read a lot on ionized
gases, but the bulk of the material is dealing with fixed, reduced
pressure stuff in single gases where things are a lot more controlled
and lend themselves to egghead discussions.
Suffice it to say that the gas conditions around a massively sparking
high power coil act to effectively load, both resistively and
capacitively the system. Also suffice it to say that without a 30 foot
diameter bell jar and a single gas load, the thought of mathematically
describing the system before hand is absolutely out of the question.
The gases are the tesla coil's performance booster.
Richard Hull, TCBOR