Re: potential gain vs. power in TC systems

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Original poster: Steve Conner <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

Hi dest and Peter,

My DRSSTC gave a 60" spark from a 14" tall coil which is a watts 
number of 4.28. I reckon that is as good as Nemesis :-P The only 
proof I have is a low resolution movie from a camera phone where you 
can barely make out the coil, let alone measure it. However it was 
witnessed by several UK coilers including Nick Field of HVFX.

It was very inefficient when pushed this far: it took about 3.3kW of 
real power as measured by a Kill-A-Watt to produce occasional 60" 
strikes. I guess the reason is that the output voltage I could use 
was limited by flashover of the small coil, so I had to use as high a 
breakrate and as long a burst length as I could, to grow the sparks 
by heat rather than E-field.

The breakrate was 200bps, the burst length 300us, and the whole 
system was overdriven by running it off a variac turned up to 270V. 
The primary current was about 450A peak at 200kHz. I basically turned 
everything up as far as it could go to see how big a spark I could get.

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