Re: very long sparks

• To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
• Subject: Re: very long sparks
• From: Thomas Gstrein <thomas.gstrein-at-stwimst.at> (by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>)
• Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2000 07:18:13 -0700
• Approved: twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net
• Delivered-To: fixup-tesla-at-pupman-dot-com-at-fixme

Do you have a photo? I can't believe this. 50 to 100 Meters. Gigantic.

Tesla List schrieb:

> Original Poster: "Jim Lux" <jimlux-at-jpl.nasa.gov>
>
> The longest artificial sparks that I am aware of were NOT produced by a
> tesla coil, but were produced by (very) large impulse generators. Les
> Renardiers group in France built a generator in the 8-9 MV range which
> produced long sparks (I'd expect >50 meters, but I don't have the reference
> handy), and in Bazelyan and Raizer ("Spark Discharge") there is an
> impressive photo of a 100+ meter (thats meters, folks, not feet) spark in
> an outdoor test lab. Put it this way, the spark is much longer than the
> height of a standard looking HV transmission tower..
>
> As a practical matter, once you get above about a megavolt, the linear
> distance/voltage relationship goes away (mostly because you are in a
> non-uniform/needle gap situation).  Not much voltage increase gets you a
> very large distance increase. This is of great concern to those designing
> EHV substations because the clearance distances get phenomenal.  At these
> voltages, the amount of energy behind the spark (mostly from Ctop in your
> Tesla coil) determines how far it can propagate.
>
> Greg Leyh's Electrum made fairly long sparks (20 meters?) and Bill Wysock's
> big coils that kVA Effects ran last year(?) also could make sparks in this
> range, but this is using pretty much state of the art components
> (particularly caps, wire, and forms). I doubt that you'd get much farther
> unless you basically built some sort of high-rep rate impulse generator.

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