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Top voltages was Re: Safety gap issues



Original poster: Steve Conner <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx>


Hmmm... That is.. the secondary inductor is still putting current/charge into the topload, and the charge isn't being lost fast enough through corona and streamers.

That does seem to be what happens. It's mostly noticeable with DRSSTCs rather than classic coils, for two reasons-

1) These coils typically use a breakout point. It's harder to push a smooth toroid with no point over its breakout voltage, because it has a large surface area where multiple streamers can appear all at once.

2) The DRSSTC works "funny" compared to a classic coil. A classic coil takes a lump of energy in the primary capacitor and transfers it to the topload capacitance where the streamers then eat it. A DRSSTC uses its primary and secondary as a matching network, to transfer the energy straight from the inverter to the streamer load. You can't think of it as a two-stage process any more- "tank capacitor to topload, topload to streamers"- since the total energy transferred can be ~5 times greater than either the tank capacitor or topload can store. This is not just speculation, we have measured it experimentally.

Anyhow, what this means is that you get quite a long, continuous burst of energy instead of it all getting transferred in 3 cycles or whatever. It's easy to see what is going on during the burst especially if you use a plane wave antenna or similar.

What I noticed on my DRSSTC: If I fire it without a breakout point, the output voltage leaps to the breakout voltage of the smooth toroid. Then the streamer forms and the voltage is suddenly pulled down to about 0.5-0.7 of the breakout voltage, where it stays until the end of the burst. The exact number depends on DC bus voltage- the higher I turn this, the better the output voltage holds up.

With a breakout point, there is no initial leap, but the behaviour from then on is pretty much the same. The envelope just rises to about the same voltage as previously (ie ~0.6 of the toroid breakout voltage) and stays there until the end of the burst. The thing to note is: The voltage it stabilises at is far above what it takes to make corona appear on the breakout.

Steve Conner
http://www.scopeboy.com/