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Re: Cooling your components
Tesla List wrote:
>
> Original Poster: "Kent & Kim Schaffer" <santoken-at-bright-dot-net>
>
> >Tesla often speculated about reducing his system losses by running
> >components of his systems under liquid air. We now know that MOST of the
> >losses in the primary circuit come from the sparkgap, and most in the
> >secondary come from the earth ground and streamer losses (for sparking
> >coils). Tesla tried to eliminate the streamer losses - we want to
> >maximize them!
>
> Whild this may seem like a stupid question to some, but why exactly did
> Tesla try to eliminate streamer losses? What was he trying to accomplish or
> study in doing this?
>
> Kent
Kent,
It's not a stupid question at all, since most Tesla Coils today are only
used to make big sparks. One of Tesla's dreams was to transmit
information and electric power without wires. He envisioned (and
patented) many ways that this could be done. The transmitter usually
consisted of a physically large coil topped by a overly large toroid
which acted as a large capacitor. In operation, the toroid would be
designed with a large enough curvature so that it would NOT nomally
break out, since this would cause unwanted losses in the system. Tesla,
the showman, often used the long, lightning-like streamers to
demonstrate the raw power of his systems to the public. Tesla, the
engineer, tried to prevent lossy streamers from occuring. The
resonator-toroid pair would then be driven at its resonant frequency
from a relatively "pure", ideally continuous wave (CW) high frequency
source, such as a high speed alternator. By driving the system from a CW
source, Tesla could build up the stored energy in this system over a
number of cycles to levels that were perhaps 100X (or more) the average
input energy - simple resonant rise on a grand scale.
This system would generate large displacement currents from the base of
the resonator and large E-fields from the toroid that could be "picked
up" by distant receivers (for example smaller tuned LC systems adjusted
to resonate at the same frequency). This would allow Tesla to provide
electric power remotely, at any location, without wires. For a variety
of technical and financial reasons a large-scale demonstration of this
approach was never completed, and it is doubtful that this approach
would be a cost effective alternative to a hard-wired transmission grid.
It's unfortunate that Tesla didn't initially focus on the use this type
system for long-range communication. Tesla's focus on wireless energy
transfer allowed Marconi to build comparatively inefficient transmitters
that sucessfully demonstrated long-range radio communication. As a
result it was Marconi who got most of the popular credit as the inventor
and "father of radio" even though Tesla was there first...
Safe coilin' to you!
-- Bert --