RE: SSTC - experiments

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

Original poster: "Mccauley, Daniel H" <daniel.h.mccauley-at-lmco-dot-com> 



Shaun,

I don't believe your Jacob's Ladder is going to work when driven by a
SSTC. There are a few issues:

1.  Tuning - The length of the rods used in a tesla coil acts as an
additional capacitance to the topload
of your coil.  If the arc broke out at the bottom, the wire capacitance
(stray to ground) may be less than 1pF.
As it starts rising, this capacitance will increase.  And initially when
you turn the unit on, you will have the
entire length of the rod to contend with.  Therefore, the SSTC may be
tuned for a particular frequency, but depending on
where the arc is with respect to the rod, the resonant frequency of your
resonator may change drastically.  As a comparison
I use different sized rods (electrodes) on my PlasmaSonic coils to vary
the frequency.  A 4" rod vs. 16" rod may be as much
as 5pF difference.  (See my PlasmaSonic Presentations for more details
on exact numbers)

2.  Break-out.  The voltage is very high on an SSTC (compared with NSTs,
etc...)  You'll need to have some serious
corona balls and corona protection in your circuit to prevent arcs from
breaking out on the top of the rods or elsewhere.

Dan



 > Ok, so I have this SSTC working, 14 inch sparks straight up from the
 > breakout point.  I'm going to try for longer sparks and
 > different type of
 > input power.  So far I've tried half wave rectified and full
 > wave rectified
 > power - 140vac from a variac.  I put a CD on a metal stand onto of the
 > toroid and it started on fire and melted - Oops...... another
 > AOL cd bit
 > the dust, at least their good for something.  I want to make
 > a big jaccobs
 > ladder with it and maybe an ion motor.  What other
 > experiments have people
 > done with there SSTC.
 >
 > These things are really cool!
 >
 >
 > Shaun Epp
 >
 >
 >