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Re: A&E Tesla coil, and Mind Freak. (fwd)



Original poster: Tom Perigrin <tip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

At 01:15 AM 12/22/2006, you wrote:

From: Peter Terren <pterren@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

Many people have assumed that spark length of DC sparks extrapolates to RF
sparks from a TC. Not so. Spark length in a TC grows due to repeated hits
far longer (eg 3 or more times) than expected.  This is easily proven by
doing single shot sparks which are ridiculously small even with huge coils.

I have been interested in using a single shot or pulsed Tesla Coil to deliver high voltage pulses to a test bed. Now, upon reading this, it seems that this won't work as well as I had envisaged. Yet I am a bit confused... Peter says that the spark grows longer due to repeated hits. Does that mean that it:

A) "walks out" by first hitting close to the coil, and this ionizes a bit of air further out which allows the next discharge to go to a more distant ground, and this process repeats until some function of resistance of the ionized air path versus voltage and power dictates that it can't extend any more? If not... then I don't see how multiple discharges would increase the distance if the first discharge has to make the full distance... because discharge(1) won't know that discharge(2) through discharge(n) are following.

B) there is actually some electrical characteristic of the coil that increases it's efficiency/power/charge/? as it cycles several times?

C) the actual difference is not distance, but power of the discharge, as the first discharge serves to slightly ionize the air and each subsequent discharge finds a less resistive path, thus allowing more power to flow.


In the first scenario... the "walking out" scenario... would a preionization of the desired air path suffice to allow for a good discharge along the desired path? In fact, would such a preionization be almost neccesary to overcome the semi-random fickleness of the discharge to follow a desired path?

Thanks for your help