Re: Science fair help...

["Clara Marie and Encil" <encil-at-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> (by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-xxxxxxxxxx>)]

Hi Dale,

Here is a post, from out of the past, that that may have some
information you can use.
Maybe you can work out a ball park figure from this information.

Please work safe.

All the luck with your project, and your future as a scientist,
engineer, physicist, or such.
W. Encil Scott


Original Poster: Terry Fritz <twf-at-verinet-dot-com>

Hi John,

At 05:55 PM 2/19/99 +0000, you wrote:
>
>  Malcolm, Reinhart, All -
>
>  This may be a good time to discuss what we think we know about
how the
>LED, fluorescent, and incandescent lamps are energized by the
Tesla coil or
>radio transmitter. These lamps need a source of electrical
energy to be
>lighted. How does this energy transfer from the Tesla coil or
radio
>transmitter to the lamps? What are the differences in the energy
transfer
>methods between the two? Only a few milliamps are required for
the LEDs but
>much more current is needed for the other lamps. Note that these
lamps are
>transmitting electromagnetic energy in the form of light
frequencies.

I won't address the radio transmitter side of this since it is
off topic
and the moderator will reject it :-))

However, the Tesla coil's ability to illuminate light bulbs and
such that
contain various low pressure gasses is well known.  Low pressure
gasses
don't need much energy to give off light.  They actually look
brighter than
they are.  The process of ionizing gasses is much more efficient,
occurs
very quickly (uS or nS) and can be done at far lower currents
than say a
filament bulb.  Thus, the energy of a Tesla coil can light them
with ease.

The phenomena is straight forward.  When a Tesla coil energizes,
the
electrostatic fields around the coil are very high.  The E-fields
are
powerful, high voltage, and can easily supply the relatively
small currents
needed to ionize gasses in a tube.  Grounding one end or holding
onto the
tube just gives a greater current do to the lower resistance to
ground.
One end of the tube is near ground, the other is place in a
fields of say
200000 volt / meter.  Obviously 200000 volts (across a 48 inch
tube) will
cause breakdown in the tube and it will light.  The E-fields are
fairly
"stiff" and can supply enough current to the tube to illuminate
it very
well.  The pulses are brief but the energy in those pulses is
very high
(the instantaneous power is well into the megawatt region) so the
tube
lights brightly.

The fact the light from these tubes is also a form of
electromagnetic
energy is not really relevant since it is a function of the
ionization
process.

You "can" illuminate a filament bulb too, but the power required
is very
high and a great load is placed on the coil.  With say 1000 watts
going
"into" a Tesla coil, it is not great challenge to trap 10 or 20
watts on
the output to light a filament bulb.  However, that is not a very
efficient
system at all. A battery would be a far better and simpler choice
of power
source.  Thus, there are 50 million homes illuminated by standard
AC power
while the number illuminated with true Tesla coils has remained
fairly
constant over the last 100 years at ZERO! :-))  This is why the
subject of
using Tesla coils to power things and the "free energy" topic is
heavily
moderated.  You "can" set such a system to light a few bulbs but
it would
not be at all practical compared to every other power
distribution system
available.  Also, operating a Tesla coil continuously for days
and weeks on
end WILL attract the FCC who WILL put an end to your little power
system
right then and there!!

>
>  Faraday discovered that changing magnetic fields could induce
currents in
>conductors. Maxwell predicted electromagnetic waves that
consisted of
>electric and magnetic fields at right angles to each other.
Hertz discovered
>these waves. How are these discoveries and others being used for
>transferring the electrical energy?

As a few of Richard Hull's video tapes show, you can have a
second Tesla
coil secondary and torrid system near a regular Tesla coil and
get nice
sparks from the second "disconnected" coil (the second coil is
grounded and
tuned to the same frequency).  The experiments of Richard and
Alex are
really neat!  This is from the second coil transferring the
E-field energy
(and perhaps some magnetic coupling form the hundreds of amps in
the
primary) back to resonating energy in the second coil system.
The second
coil has fairly high Q and will develop a voltage needed to cause
breakout
(which lowers the Q drastically).  Richard's tapes demonstrate
that placing
a conductive sheet between the coils will stop the effect.  This
is due to
the conductor blocking the E-field effects.  Again, I forget the
numbers of
the videos but Richard Hull can sell them to you if you are
really interested.

>
>  Many coilers (including myself) have made these tests but have
been very
>vague in describing how the energy that is lighting the lamps
was obtained.

I have done a fair amount a field mapping and testing using field
sensing
attennas.  I can assure you that the fields around an operating
Tesla coil
are very powerful and can easily light gas tubes or produce other
such
effects.  There is a simple way to get a very rough idea of these
fields.
If you guess that the output voltage is 400000 volts (probably
pretty
typical) and the secondary current is say 10 amps.  Then you can
guess that
the E-fields are very roughly 400000 volts per meter for a
typical coil.
Since the secondary current is stored as in the capacitance of
the
secondary system in the space around the Tesla coil.  You can
divide the
secondary current by the area of a surface around the coil and
get a rough
idea of the current per unit of area.  For 10 amps and say 10
square
meters, the current is 1 amp per square meter around the coil or
400kW of
instant available power (really kVA) per every square meter of
area.
Easily enough to illuminate any gas tube.  If this energy were
continuos
instead of pulsed, the effects would be very dramatic as in the
case of
large tube coils.

I don't think the RF nature or the specific frequency has any
real affect
on any of this.  Almost all of our coils run in the 100-500kHz
range which
really is rather narrow.  However, larger low frequency coils and
smaller
high frequency coils show the same effects.  Very high
frequencies may do
some other funny things but they probably would no longer be
"Tesla coil"
effects at that point.

I wrote this rather quickly and I am not a physics type so
forgive small
errors and correct any big ones...

 Terry

PS - Please keep posts on this topic practical, on the subject of
Tesla
coils, and of general interest and usefulness to us all.  I
haven't
rejected a "free energy" post for almost 10 hours now! :-)  There
ARE
important energy transfer effects involved with Tesla coils
despite the
"pie in the sky" impractical stuff.  I hate to reject all posts
on a topic
like this just because it has such a high probability of going
off topic.
I may be making a mistake supporting this subject but I killed it
once and
I can kill it again :-))  I probably WILL have to, but hopefully,
we can
get some use out of it till then...