streamer musings...

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

Original poster: "Wells Campbell by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <wellscampbell-at-onebox-dot-com>

hello, 

I've had an idea scratching around in the ol' bean for a while, and wanted
to test it as soon as my coil was done, but since the construction seems
to be lagging, I figured I would just throw it out there and see if 1)
any of you theory masters could ruminate on it and 2) if any of you builders
(empiricists) had observed it. 

the reasoning is this: 1) if streamers, as a (partially) conductive entity,
increase the effective area of topload, thus topload capacitance, and
effectively change (lower) the frequency of operation
of a coil, much as a larger toroid would, or even a streamer shaped wire
attached to the toroid. 

2) if they reach some sort of length limit, where the frequency shift
would permit only a certain length streamer to form before the system
was out of tune enough to be unable to grow them any longer...

bear with me here...

3) that a variable primary inductor might be able to "grow" them past
this limit as the coil operated. in other words, slowly tune in more
primary inductance to keep up with the greater streamer length and consequent
lower frequency. 

what I want to do to experiment with this is of course build a variable
off-axis primary tuner and see what happens when I slowly add more inductance
as the coil operates. it seems that if it worked, what would happen is
that the arc would grow for a bit, then go out, at which point the system
would be unable to "catch up" with the lower frequency, and operate out
of tune. To grow another, the user would simply tune back again, and
begin to slowly "dial up" another. 

the best would be if you could grow the streamers by hand, and see how
long you could make them before they collapsed. that would be cool indeed...

has anyone thought about this, or seen anything that supports this vague
musing?

-- 
Wells Campbell
wellscampbell-at-onebox-dot-com