Hybrid gap?

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

Original poster: "Black Moon by way of Terry Fritz <teslalist-at-qwest-dot-net>" <black_moons-at-hotmail-dot-com>

In one of my many hours of insanity.. I thought about.. how would you 
quench an xenon bulb..
Well.. since you can't really stick a fan in there etc.. i thought about 
solid state equivs.... We could short out the bulb to let its arc go out 
due to no current, then turn off the solid state device
Or we can put it in series
I kinda like the advantage of the par idea, as it allows you to lower the 
arcs 'on' resistance, but still not using a full blown solid state 
switching device, or just use it to qench for even cheap solid state devices..
Also, it would'nt be exposed to the full ringdown (well, it would, but the 
ring voltage would be clamped at whatever the spark gap conducts at)
The series method tho... it might allow static gaps to act as sync gaps, 
but id assume you'd want the swiching device on befor the arc fires to 
eliminate turnon loss. then your quench time is much lower.
However, if you used the device to trigger the gap so to speak, you could 
put a small cap across the gap, and have the switching device kinda half on 
(well.. ok, more like 1/10000th on or something)
so that the gap would breakdown at say 10kv, but the switching device would 
only charge the cap to say 7kv, leaveing only 3kv across the switching 
device (allowing you to use cheaper devices)
one note, you may have to turn off near the end of the ringdown to use a 
lower voltage device otherwise the back EMF of the primary may surge when 
its disconnected (possabley even higher then the input voltage)

_