Re: AMRAD Spark Gaps

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Luc by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>" <ludev-at-videotron.ca>

Hi all

I put a scan of an old plan for a quench gap on the web.
 http://pages.infinit-dot-net/luc2/quenchgap.gif
I don't know how it could perform especially with acrylic spacer. But may
be you could calculate how
much loss in the gap  vs how fast the gap could exhaust that heat . This
plan come from Information
Unlimited.

Luc Benard



Tesla list wrote:

> Original poster: "Oxandale, Terry by way of Terry Fritz
<twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>" <Toxandale-at-SPP-dot-org>
>
> I'm not an industrial engineer, but I can hold my own in a mechanical
> environment. When I built this (and I may have stated this earlier)
> device, other than gasket problems (which were a concern even before I
> built it but I was just using what I had on hand to see if it would
> work), the only other problem was the uneven expansion of the discs
> during the warm-up (initial arc time). the arcing side of each disc
> would get hotter than the opposite (non-arcing) side, and thus this
> uneven expansion closed the gap somewhat. Now multiply this times the
> number of gaps, and you could have a significant problem with many gaps
> (which is why I think mine worked best at about 5 to 6 gaps). Intuition
> tells me that if we make the center arcing surface too large in area,
> that this expansion problem will be exacerbated. I don't know if a
> thinner disc would curve less than a thick disc would (due to the
> temperature evening out quickly). Ideally you would want to use a single
> disc that is symmetrically convex (like a lens) or like two hats put
> together at the brim. This way, arcing would occur on both sides of the
> disc, but in my case, this entailed machining that I did not have
> available to me at the time. This is a most resourceful bunch of folks
> on this list so I know somebody is going to come up with even better
> ideas (other than a lot of elbow grease and grit like we used to do to
> make telescope lenses)

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