John,
Chris,sparks to air are different than ground strikes. Only ground strikes drainthe energy quickly overall (if the strike happens early in the bang). John
I think Richie's waveforms show that after about cycles the voltage broke out and arced to ground which pretty much killed the tank energy. There is still some left and it rings down very slow. So I assume here that there was no voltage breakout and the ring down was just down to losses.
I was wondering if the secondary was less inductance, the frequency would be higher, so the secondary should be easier to "soak up" the tank energy than a higher inductance one ?
I ran some figures and got that when you half the turns, it doubles the frequency and the inductance goes down by a factor of 4 (approx). According to JavaTC, 200khz is 27.5uS transfer time, and 400khz 13.7uS.
Idea is that if you can transfer the energy quicker by using a higher frequency, then breakout will happen a lot sooner and drain the tank cap a lot faster...
I think there are a lot of complications though. For one, if the coil sparks to ground, lets just say the tank is empty and the RSG dwell time is not important (since there is zero in the tank left anyway)...... Now normally lets say the spark gap quenches at the 4th notch which lets say is 400uS at 200khz... Then at 400khz the gap would still take 400uS to quench ? I think as the cycles are running faster that the quench time would also half to 200uS for the 4th notch...
Frequency is a tricky one to think in terms of notches and quench times. I expect frequency would not alter things other than the amount of time to take to transfer the energy. Such as 200khz 400uS or 400khz 200uS. In both cases ( all other factors being the same) that it would still quench at the 4th notch.....
At first I thought that 200khz or 400khz the gap would still take 400uS to quench, as I was thinking more mechanical dwell times. So the higher frequency would quench at the 8th notch and drain more power... But I think I as realise now, other factors can cause the gap to quench ( like arcs to ground) anyway, so its really irrelevant anyway....
So assuming a arc to ground which assuming it drains the tank to zero, it would not matter if it was 200khz or 400khz, as it would still take the same amount of cycles to complete the transfer (say 4) but the higher frequency of 400khz just does it in 200uS and not 400uS as in 200khz....
I am also trying to work out, that other than coupling and frequency which effect the tank "transfer speed" to secondary... can the secondary itself become "easier to drive" to make the transfer quicker ? this is why I thought that a lower inductance would take less time to "charge" and the energy transfer would be quicker than a lower inductance.... though this could just be down to a higher frequency...
cheers, Chris _______________________________________________ Tesla mailing list Tesla@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.pupman.com/mailman/listinfo/tesla