Re: Practical Magnifier Design ? ?

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

Original poster: "Gavin Dingley" <gdingley-at-ukf-dot-net> 

Hi,
I built a little table top magnifier a few years ago. I accidentally came
across the magnifying effect while playing around with standard tesla coils
(although I obviously was aware of the magnifier principle). So my "design"
materialised along the empirical, rather than the theoretical path. You can
see the set-up and results on my aging website, which I threw together one
afternoon as a stab at raw html scripting, rather than a nice fully
functional WebPage.
The address is: http://www.tesla-research.ukf-dot-net
I plan to put some more stuff up on it, mainly my solid state coil, as soon
as I can get the University to part with a little bit of lab space.

Anyway, here are my very raw none theoretical tips for magnifier design.

1) Yes, high coupling between the primary and secondary coils. You will find
that arcing occurs between the two initially, but after connecting the extra
coil and properly tuning the system, you will find this will cease.

2) Make sure your secondary coil inductance is allot smaller than your extra
coil inductance, i.e. one tenth to one fifth, look at the website to get a
working ratio.

3) Keep your extra coil well away from the primary-secondary "transformer"
system, so that you take full advantage of the zero magnetic coupling and
hence greater free-resonance.

4) Some say you need a big top-load capacity and small extra coil
inductance. I didn't follow this, mainly because the power I was using was
about 100VA. It is only at high powers (>1kVA) that this applies. The reason
for this is to encourage large white streamers, carrying relatively high
currents, which of course have greater effect. But much the same can be said
for ordinary tesla coil design, only it is more pronounced in magnifiers.

Now some of the more experienced individuals out there will jump down my
throat about the above sloppy comments, but they are only very general rules
that I have made with a relatively poor magnifier design. However, it out
performed my original tesla coil system, the coil system from which the
magnifier developed.

Regards,

Gavin


----- Original Message -----
From: "Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
To: <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2003 9:40 PM
Subject: Practical Magnifier Design ? ?


 > Original poster: "Mccauley, Daniel H" <daniel.h.mccauley-at-lmco-dot-com>
 >
 >
 > One of my winter projects this year will be my first magnifier design.
 > I wanted to find out if anyone had
 > some good practical information on the design of magnifiers.  Some of
 > the keys I've read about so far have been close coupling between primary
 > and secondary, good gap quenching, and proper impedance matching betwen
 > secondary and resonant coils.
 >
 > I've tried searching some of the pupman archives, but it seems the
 > server hasn't been working lately and I'm trying to order both of
 > Richard Hull's videos on Magnifier design also.  And I did find some
 > good theoretic information on magnifiers from Antonio Carlos M. de
 > Queiroz's webpage.
 >
 > But if anyone has any very practical information or a resource I could
 > tap (without being too overwhelmed with "super hardcore" theory) I'd
 > appreciate it.  By practical information, I mean general rules, design
 > equations, rules of thumb, construction tips, etc...)
 >
 > Thanks
 >
 >