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First THOR measurement results
Hello everybody.
Eventually I got everything setup and working, in order to measure the THOR TC
performance.
I did it today and I stored in a temporary web page the most significative
oscilloscope snapshots. The address is
http://www.saunalahti.fi/dncmrc/work/tempmeas.htm.
The performance achieved was:
Peak voltage: 14.7 kV
Bang energy: 10.8 J
Bang rate: 354 BPS
Total power: 3727 W
Max streamer to ground: 8.2 feet (2.5 meters)
You can see a snapshot of the primary voltage in the web page (4th picture from
up). Now I have got 2 questions for you all.
Question 1
---------------
You can see in my web page (first 3 shots) the primary voltage when
breaking out
into air, to ground or with no streamers.
1. Discharging to ground sucks quickly all the energy away. That's OK.
2. To discharge into air, I needed to add a copper stick on the top of the
toroid: only then I had a secure discharge into air or to a nearby grounded
rod.
Breaking into air sucks pretty quickly too all the energy away and there is
also
nothing strange with that.
3. With no copper stick I have difficulties to get any streamer at all. This
makes me think that I don't generate enough potential at the secondary to
breakout. The toroid r.o.c. is a little too big. But my RSG is unable to
quench!!! See the snapshot!
Question:
- do you agree with me about the above?
- I think that if I could quench the RSG I could accumulate more charge on the
toroid, reach the actual breakout threshold and get longer streamers WITHOUT
NEEDING THE ROD: do you agree?
- in order to better the quenching, shouldn't I add a fixed SG set in series to
the RSG? Wouldn't that be OK?
Question 2
---------------
The performance of Thor (spark length) decreases quite rapidly within 15-30
seconds. This is expecially noticeable without the copper rod placed on the
toroid: then streamers are quite rare and stop coming within 10-15 seconds.
What
might be the reason? I suppose the RSG overheating and crippling the quenching
or what? I have already heard of this kind of behaviour but I can't recall what
was the explanation. Anybody?