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Re: (Holy) Crap!



Original poster: "Dr. Resonance" <resonance@xxxxxxxxxx>



In gases, including air, this is known as "metastable decay". It also happens in acrylic plate when hit hard with UV radiation. Electrons, excited by HV or UV radiation, are pumped up to higher orbitals, then "decay" back to their normal orbitals releasing energy in the form of photons, ie, light energy. The decay time depends on the materials and the intensity and form of the radiation

Dr. Resonance

>The plasmoid looks a whole lot like the final "flame" that
>reaches the top of my high powered Jacob's ladder just before the
>arc extenguishes and restarts at the the bottom. When the flame
>extenguishes at the top, I have noticed that sometimes a small por-
>tion of the arc flame will "detach" from the main body of the arc for
>a split second before vanishing.

I took some pics once of a Jacob's ladder I set up on my 10kVA pig. It seemed to me that the plasma from the arc was sustaining freely at the top for an instant, and when I looked at the pics, sure enough that's what was happening. There were bits of plasma of various sizes freely floating at the top, and some shots showed them decaying while the next arc had restarted and traveled up from the bottom. So for such a typical setup as a medium-powered Jacob's ladder, it's possible for plasma to "dwell" for ostensibly dozens of milliseconds. I would guess that introducing an order of magnitude of additional mass into the arc (water) would increase the mass of the plamsa, and thus allow an order of magnitude increase in the "dwell" time.

-Phil LaBudde