Antonio,
I find that producing (long) streamers has a dramatic impact on all of
my systems. The primary current envelope never looks the same as it
does with sparks being produced. The Q of the system seems to drop
off steeply, and this is reflected in the primary as a plateau of
primary current, and sometimes a near-notching condition (where as
before spark production, the primary current would continue to rise).
Ground sparks seem to present a different load all together, and may
result in the primary current climbing higher, or dropping off, it
depends a lot on the tuning. Note that my systems use primary current
feedback, so driving the system from a fixed oscillator is probably a
different story.
Steve Ward
On 8/31/06, Tesla list <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Original poster: acmq@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi:
I have made some experiments to verify if my ideas about how to design a
DRSSTC work as expected. A programmable signal generator makes an adequate
driver for low-power excitation:
http://www.coe.ufrj.br/~acmq/tesla/drsstc1.pdf
The design procedure is described here:
http://www.coe.ufrj.br/~acmq/tesla/drsstc.html
It's interesting to observe that the same elements used for a regular Tesla
coil work almost exactly for a DRSSTC. Only a small tuning adjustment is
required, and losses and detuning affect both systems in similar ways.
It remains to be verified how this works in producing sparks. If
the Tesla coil works, and the waveforms are almost identical, the same
results are expected.
Note that I used sinusoidal input. Square wave input doesn't change
much the waveforms.
Antonio Carlos M. de Queiroz