Re: Practical Magnifier Design ? ?

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

Original poster: "Antonio Carlos M. de Queiroz" <acmq-at-compuland-dot-com.br> 

Tesla list wrote:

 > Original poster: FutureT-at-aol-dot-com

 > In my magnifier work, I never saw any efficiency improvement compared
 > to a normal 2-coil Tesla coil.  I did not do any tests over 5kW.  In one
 > experiment, I placed the resonator directly on top of the secondary,
 > thereby changing the coil to a 2-coil system, and the spark length
 > increased by 1".

This is expected. The effective coupling is increased, and the
efficiency
rises. A magnifier can even be designed to work in this way, with the
three coils magnetically coupled (a quite confuse design, but apparently
possible).
The advantages would be the elimination of part of the self-capacitance
of the L2-L3 series (in this case forming an autotransformer) in
the calculation of the maximum voltage gain sqrt(C1/C3), and the faster
energy transfer.

 > To fully take advantage of Antonio's proposals, the gap must have
 > excellent quenching.  It's not clear if such quenching can be practically
 > achieved without excessive gap losses.  It's not clear to me if the
 > achieved spark length depends more on the initial resonator ring up
 > energy, or if it depends on the entire energy over the ring-down period.
 > If the initial energy is the key, then Antonio's method may provide more
 > of a benefit, even if the quenching is marginal.

A fast magnifier may be good for producing long sparks to ground. There
is no need for primary quenching in this case.

Antonio Carlos M. de Queiroz