Re: TC & Lightning

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

Original poster: "Paul Nicholson" <paul-at-abelian.demon.co.uk> 

[pulse compression using solenoid dispersion]

Steve Conner wrote:
 > I can't imagine how you would make a physical TC resonator that
 > had a dispersion pattern that was useful for pulse compression.
 > Can you?

After some thought, no.  Solenoids of the kind we use and study
don't seem to have enough delay time or dispersion to do anything
useful for us.

Jim Lux wrote:
 > where and why do you want a compressed pulse?

I just suggested it as an alternative way, in principle, to use a
coil, one that doesn't involve resonance at all.  It's purely a
travelling wave thing, ie it doesn't rely on any sort of standing
wave formed by interference with a reflected wave.  Instead it
relies on a momentary constructive interference occuring amongst
a group of forward travelling waves.

To be of any use the coil must have sufficient delay and dispersion
to be able to convert a decent bang's worth of total chirp energy
into a single pulse.  It's got to do the whole job of stepping up
the voltage and compressing the burst power - it cannot call upon
or augment the usual resonance effects.

The chirp duration must be equal to the difference in transit times
of the slowest and fastest frequency components, so that they all
arrive at the far end in unison.  For even the most favourable
assumptions involving normal TC coils this comes out to be only a
few uS or so.   That means high burst power with little actual
pulse compression occuring.
--
Paul Nicholson
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