Re: 20 joules at 100 bps vs 4 joules at 500 bps - any difference?

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Original poster: Steve Conner <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

Hi John, all,

Everything I have seen so far playing with coils has
tended to support John's old results that he posted.
The most efficient conversion from electrical power to
spark length seems to happen at low break rates around
100Hz. Increasing the bang energy is a far better way
to get longer sparks than increasing the break rate.

However, high breakrates can make sparks that look and
sound impressive. They can also help to force long
sparks out of a short secondary coil: if you tried to
do this by energy alone the coil would die from racing
sparks/flashovers.

If all goes well, myself, Alan and Richie will be
doing some similar tests at the weekend using a
DRSSTC, and a DC charging spark gap coil with a
variable speed rotary gap. Both coils have meters for
DC bus voltage and current so we can see how much
power is being delivered, and are about the same size
and work at about the same frequency.

Our main goal is to try to quantify how much more
efficient a DRSSTC really is. We will set the two
coils up for the same input power and breakrate, and
see which sparks furthest. Since one secondary is tall
and thin and the other is short and fat, we'll repeat
the test with the resonators swapped over, to control
for differences in the electric field.

Steve Conner