Re: Big Spark Induction Coil

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

Original poster: "Antonio Carlos M. de Queiroz by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <acmq-at-compuland-dot-com.br>

Tesla list wrote:
> 
> Original poster: "Kurt Schraner by way of Terry Fritz
<twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <k.schraner-at-datacomm.ch>

> I don't think, you're misinterpreteing my pic's. I'm myself wondering
> about the long duration of the higher frequency "f1" part in the
> oscillograms. But this oscillation behavior is experimentally true: you
> can watch(live) the extension of the "f1"-time by manually shortening
> the spark electrode distance. The same behavior was obseved recently,
> using just an ignition coil. However: may be, the spark itself is
> lighting and extinguishing many times, during this perjod of some 3.x
> ms. The jacobs-ladder photos of my inductor seem to lead, to suppose
> short sparking times, as very distinct sparks can be observed, while the
> coil was operated at 50Hz. The pulses, however, were generated by short,
> about 1ms lasting, capacitor discharges from the "dimmer".

I think that I have figured out what happens.
A key point is that you are looking at the primary current. The spark
practically short-circuits the secondary, stopping the energy transfer
by coupled oscillations. The spark is reignited for some cycles just
by "transformer" action of the system. When there is not enough energy
to reignite the spark, the coupled oscillations restart, without sparks,
until the remaining energy in the system is dissipated.
There is a tuning condition where when the first spark appears,
at the first peak of the secondary voltage, there is no energy in the
primary. The tuning is then optimal, and all the energy is transferred
to the spark at once. The distributed nature of the secondary may
change this a bit.

Antonio Carlos M. de Queiroz