Re: SCIENCE FAIR BOTTLE CAPACITOR ExPERIMENT HELP!!!

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

Original poster: Jim Lux <jimlux-at-earthlink-dot-net> 

At 07:47 AM 11/19/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>Original poster: "Nightmare" <nightmare-at-bak.rr-dot-com>
>I am going to see which liquid in a bottle cap is the best. like i will use
>salt water in one test and gatorade(lots of electrolytes) for another. Can
>someone tell me how I would compare which is better??? or how i would check
>which is better?


All manner of ways to evaluate it..
First, you could use standard lab techniques to characterize the capacitor 
(loss and capacitance...)  This would require some moderately specialized 
equipment which you could make (i.e. an impedance bridge).

Or, you could measure the performance in terms of its effect on the Tesla 
coil output, for some metric like "longest spark".

You'd also want to characterize how the tuning of the primary changed, if 
at all.