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Re: Displacement Current Revisited

I reply to so little nowadays as there is little new to reply to.  However,
this
was a superb experiment and the great thing about the compass is it cannot
repond
to sinusodial EM fields.
(such as damped waves)  It is responding to a NET effect of what amounts to a
net
direct current flowing SOMEWHERE.  Richard Wall is a first rate experimenter
and
this is unexpected by me, as I though the DC was all and electrostatic wave,
however there seems to be some net currents in the DC direction too!  I gotta'
try
this one....

Richard Hull, TCBOR



Tesla List wrote:

> Original Poster: rwall-at-ix-dot-netcom-dot-com
>
> 2/28/99
>
> Yesterday I lashed up a horizontal TC.  I bolted my 4" coil to a piece of
> 1/2 plywood with three 1/4" nylon bolts and fastened an old 6" helical
primary
> to the same bolts.  There was only 1" between the primary and secondary.
> Without major retuning, I placed it in the horizontal position.  The TC was
> placed horizontally with the base East and ball termination West.  I attached
> a cheap plastic compass to a 5' wooden stick with masking tape.
>
> With the coil firing at low power I approached the side of the coil with the
> compass.  The compass reacted to the TC magnetic field(s).  The fields were
> nonuniform, probably due to poor tuning.  At this point I noticed occasional
> racing sparks at the lower 1/3 of the coil arcing to the top of the primary.
>
> I could actually touch the compass to the side of the coil and there was no
> arcing to the compass, although if I approached the coil termination there
> were small arcs to the compass which did not seem to affect the needle
> orientation.
>
> At about the upper 1/3 of the TC, the compass was attracted to a longitudnal
> orientation with the long axis of the coil.  The attraction was not uniform
> and was intermittantly strongest with the larger and longer sparks.  The
> North seeking needle was attracted to the base of the secondary.  If there
> is similarity to the drinking straw air core solenoid, this would be the
> negative end of the coil.
>
> Strangly enough, I also noticed that the end of the compass needle tended to
> deflect and dip or rise sometimes when the side of the coil was approached.
> Could there be more than one magnetic field orientation with a TC?  I turned
> the TC vertically and approached the mid section of the TC from the East.
> The North seeking end of the needle swung East away from the coil.
> Approaching from the West the North seeking end of the needle again swung
> East toward he coil.
>
> At this point the arcing from primary to secondary was almost constant and
the
> introduction of HV 60 Hz current into the secondary made it too dangerous to
> continue with this experimental platform.  I stopped.  Inspection reveals two
> loops of burned out Cu wire on the secondary.  I attribute this to poor
tuning
> and the closeness of the primary to the secondary.
>
> Conclusions:  There are definitely magnetic fields associated with a
disruptive
>
> TC as measured with a compass.  The compass is a crude, but easy, qualitative
> way to assess magnetic fields of a TC.  There is an overall magnetic field,
as
> measured by the compass, that that is oriented longitudnally with the long
axis
> of the TC secondary.  There is a net sum bias of the alternating magnetic
> fields
> due to a DC current in the coil.  If the DC current air coil solenoid and
> compass experiment is extended to the TC, the base of the coil has a negative
> DC bias with respect to the termination.  This magnetic field is not
continous,
>
> but varies irregurally with the intensity of the discharges from the coil.
> (I leave it to others to determine if this DC current and magnetic field
which
> appears most strongly during discharges is from some type of gaseous
> rectification or is intrinsic to the TC)  There is also "another" magnetic
> field
> that appears perpendicular to the first magnetic field and the long axis of
> the coil.  This magnetic field would appear consistant with the DC current
> single wire compass experiment.  As improbable as it may seem, the long axis
> of the TC secondary can be viewed as a long wire.  I leave it to the
> transmission ine experts to explain this one.
>
> The compass is quite crude, but does respond to TC magnetic fields.  Further
> evaluation should be carried out with more sensitive and precise devices.
> Perhaps better detectors such as Terry's planar antenna and fiber optics or
> Hall devices will better map these fields and give a better explanation of
> TC function.
>
> RWW