Re: Further MMC woes.

["Jim Lux" <jimlux-at-xxxxxxxxxxxx> (by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-xxxxxxxxxx>)]

> >I placed short pieces of thick plastic tubing around every other cap by 
> >slitting the tubing length wise and slipping it over every other cap.
This 
> >effectively insulated every cap from its neighbor. Then I place poly 
> >sheeting between the caps and the resisters and put generous amounts of 
> >silicone seal around the ends to make sure there was no possibility of 
> >arching between the solder joints. I used heat sinks to protect the caps

> >from heat when I was soldering the joints as well. Within 3-10 seconds
after 
> >I hooked it up to my tank circuit of a static air-cooled gap and a 12/30

> >tranny, a cap would blow, throwing carbon all over the place. 

Something to think about, although probably not relevant here, is that
plastic tubing with a lengthwise slit probably isn't all that great an
insulator.  The key on insulating for high voltage is "uniformity".. any
small voids, particles, gaps, etc. actually make things much worse.  Air
isn't all that great an insulator, but (usually) it is uniform. The slit
tubing has this nice breakdown path already put into it: the slit.

If you had 15 caps in series, even with 25 kV across the string, the
voltage difference from one cap to the next is going to be less than 2kV. 
I would expect even the thinnest of plastic layers to block this..

Something else weird is going on...