Re: Marx Bank Charging Supply

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Jonathan Peakall by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <jpeakall-at-madlabs.info>

Richard,

.but if you are basically after big, loud sparks rather than precise
> waveforms, inductors are much more hassle - the inductance has to be
> pretty high to avoid the DC path becoming significant and sapping the
> energy after the initial firing, and also think about the standoff
> voltage the windings would have to sustain. Resisters will be much
> easier.

How much loss are we talking here? With a small 15kV or so Marx, I didn't
*see* much difference between resistors and inductors. I don't have
equipment to measure big DC pulses, so this is just judging sparks by size.
Many of the designs I see out there use inductors. I haven't found any cheap
source of HV resistors, and if I build a unit using lesser rated resistors,
I would be worried about breakdown/repair. This happened on a smaller unit
of mine. Although the carbon tracks the resistors left behind still allowed
the Marx to work ;-) And the truth is that I am not that interested in
"ultimate" performance. If it is a little lossy, I'll throw more power at it
or add another stage.  If you know of a source of cheap HV resistors, I'll
try a test with the new Marx I am building.

Regards,

Jonathan Peakall