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Piezoelectric Tesla coil (was Caps)
Tesla List wrote:
>
> Original Poster: "Scott Stephens" <Scott2-at-mediaone-dot-net>
> Now even if you use commercial peizo caps, you still have ultrasonic
> considerations. The piezo ceramic stores all that energy as stress, and your
> cap can end up looking like a massive inductor at reasonance! That's right,
> the quartz crystal in your wristwatch has an effective inductance and
> thousand of Henries, IIRC! Thats because energy as stress turns into
> vibrational momentum (effective inductance). So you must design your
> capacitor with acoustics, mechanics, in mind.
This makes me think that it's probably possible to make a kind of
Tesla coil with a big piezoelectric crystal as primary circuit.
It can be excited by a capacitive discharge, much as done with a
Tesla transformer primary, or even mechanically (!!??). A secondary
coil attached to a conductive plate in one side of the crystal,
with a similar plate at the other side grounded, can resonate
exactly as in a conventional coil if tuned to the resonance frequency
of the crystal (or close to this, since the direct connection is
a bit different to a magnetic coupling, and this is a 6th order
system, in some ways similar to a magnifier). I am not sure yet
if the resulting circuit allows efficient energy transfer, however.
I saw some time ago some huge crystals used in sonar systems, and
your post connected the ideas.
Antonio Carlos M. de Queiroz