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Re: Magnifying Tesla Coils

Original poster: FutureT@xxxxxxx

In a message dated 11/16/05 1:51:08 PM Eastern Standard Time, tesla@xxxxxxxxxx writes:


To get a magnifier, you have to chose a topload with a very high
breakdown voltage for your secondary so you have no streamers going
into the air because they only represent energy loss in this place.



Q,

Because of the way magnifiers are tuned, the topload on the secondary
does not need to be that large.  The voltage will actually be divided
in some proportion across the secondary and the tertiary coil.
The secondary top sees a much lower voltage than the tertiary topload
sees.  Usually just a moderate corona ring on top of the secondary
is adequate.  In some cases a very large top load is used on top
of the secondary to create certain proportions for the capacitance
in various areas of the magnifier system.

The secondary is not the place where the discharges will take place.
You connect a wire to the topload of this coil. The other end of the
wire is connected to a tertiary coil called the "extra coil". It
forms the second big part of a magnifier, the resonator, while the
classic tesla coil (which won't emit streamers because of the big
topload) acts only as a driver for the resonator. The other end of
the tertiary (the one not connected to the topload of the secondary)
has a topload placed on it which has a breakdown voltage causing
streamers into the air.



Although the tuning is complex using Antonio's formulas, generally
magnifiers are not built in this way and are tuned in a much more
approximate way using rules of thumb.

In the way that magnifiers are usually built, they don't actually
magnify anything.  They generally give about the same performance
as a well-designed classic Tesla coil.  If the coupling can be
made a little tighter in the magnifier than in the classic coil,
then a slight bit more performance may be gained.  The coupling
of a magnifier is not the driver coupling, but rather the the overall
coupling as calculated using Antonio's formula.

Antonio's method should theoretically give superior performance,
but this has not been demonstrated in a working, spark-producing
magnifier.

John