RE: Bang Size

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

Original poster: "Arpit Thomas" <neko4-at-dodo-dot-com.au> 

well your comment set me a-thinking. Now a spark gap cool feature is that 
it conducts only when the cao voltage gets high enough, right? But what if 
you had a reliable, predictable cap charger? Surely you could use a very 
large diameter rotary spark gap, only the disk(s) are moved closer 
together, so that when its time to trigger, the terminals actually 
physically touch, so that nomatter what the voltage across a 'gap' would 
be, it'd conduct. this would be of very low resistance.
Of course youd need to make sure that your cap actually was charged by the 
time the 'gap' fired, but that won't be difficult, especially not with high 
amperages.  THe reason for the large diameter is then the electrodes wou;d 
have a very high velocity, and any spark which forms when the electrodes 
are say 0.5 cm away from touching, would be quenched extremely quickly.

SO in essence this would be like the stator of a permanent magnet dc motor 
wouldnt it....

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 17/01/2004 at 6:56 PM Tesla list wrote:

 >Original poster: Terry Fritz <teslalist-at-twfpowerelectronics-dot-com>
 >
 >Hi Luke,
 >
 >At 10:25 AM 1/17/2004, you wrote:
 >>...
 >>
 >>I was wondering what is said to be the value used for the losses in
 >>joules through a spark gap static and rotary.
 >
 >I generally put spark gap losses at 30 to 50% of the input energy.  Spark
 >gaps waste an enormous amount of power!!  But no "easy" substitute has
 >been
 >found yet.
 >
 >Cheers,
 >
 >         Terry