RE: [TCML] Re: Spark gap Resistance

["Lau, Gary" <Gary.Lau@xxxxxx>]

Actually, since power is I-squared * R, peak power in the gap is 1316 MegaWatts, or 1.3GW.  But that's a peak value, for a very brief interval - good for bragging rights, but little else.  The RMS current value for the duration of the gap on-time is a small fraction of the 4200A (sorry, no estimate, but <<4200A).  And when you average that over a duty cycle (picking numbers out of the air) of ~ 10usec/8msec or 0.125% that the gap is actually on, you'd arrive at a more realistic figure for the amount of energy that's actually dissipated in the gap.

Regards, Gary Lau
MA, USA

> -----Original Message-----
> From: tesla-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:tesla-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On
> Behalf Of David Rieben
> Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2007 1:42 PM
> To: Tesla Coil Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [TCML] Re: Spark gap Resistance
>
> Hi Greg, all,
>
> Maybe I'm missing something here. 4200 amps (peak) across
> 0.65 ohms translates to 11.466 MEGAwatts peak power loss!
> I know the SG is the culprit for the biggest waste of power in
> the primary circuit (the heat associated with the SG electrodes
> and their associated mounting hardware verifies a significant
> power loss) but this seems like a rather large sum of
> lost power, even for peak levels.? Even with the really low
> 0.005 ohms for the silicon switch there would still be over 100kW
> peak power loss at 4500 amps peak. I'm not that great on the higher
> math but this seems to suggest that with an assumed 80% effeciency,
> the primary circuit's peak power must be on the order of >50
> MW? I suppose with the size of coils that Greg builds, 50
> MW isn't that unthinkable for peak power levels, though.
>
> David Rieben

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