Tesla coil and magnifier optimization

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

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

Hi:

I am making available at my site two programs:

The Optesla program can optimize a Tesla coil circuit
including losses. It can also design a lossless circuit
and plot voltage and current waveforms during the energy
transfer transient. The program assumes a linear lumped
model.

The Optmag program can do the same for a magnifier circuit.

The main use of these programs is in investigation about the
effect of losses in the ideal model, and about what can be
done to minimize their effect in the energy transfer.

The result is not very interesting, however. If the primary
and secondary (tertiary) capacitances are not changed, the
programs give always something very close to the lossless
design as the optimum.

It's maybe more interesting to explore the effects of
imperfect tuning, that can lead to greater output voltage
and greater output energy using the same coils, if the
capacitances are allowed to change.

I was hoping to use them to find solutions where the
output waveform is not changed, but the voltage is
higher, that can in the case of a Tesla coil, be obtained
by adjusting the primary capacitor and the coupling
coefficient. So far I couldn't make the programs find
these solutions. But they find solutions with greater
output voltage by allowing changes in the output
waveform.

The optimization method used can easily get trapped in
local minima, specially in the magnifier case if the
objective is set to complete energy transfer. But given
and adequate starting point, it works well enough.

The programs have also the lossless design formulas for
the Tesla coil and magnifier circuits implemented, so
it's easy to study the properties of the several modes
of operation.

The two programs are in:
http://www.coe.ufrj.br/~acmq/programs
(Windows versions)

Antonio Carlos M. de Queiroz