On 16:59, Weinhold Shannon L wrote:
A multi ring toroid has practically the same capacitance of a solid one, but has smaller breakdown voltage.Although I am curious...if we are to use a toroid constructed of the smaller diameter rings...is the capacitance the same as a equally sized solid surface toroid? If so, it this only true at high voltage? He was really pushing the use of the smallest possible capacity and charging it to the maximum potential. Does a multi ring toroid have less capacitance but still have the same potential before breakout occurs?
This is a distributed capacitance. One "plate" is the toroid, the other is everything around. As long as the distance to other objects is large in relation to the separation of the rings, the charge stored in everything around is the same, and so the charge in the toroid is the same too. This is valid for any voltage. Of course, if there is breakdown in the air around the toroid, the effective shape of the toroid is changed, and the capacitance increases. This fact allows a trick discovered centuries ago. A metal ring has great part of the capacitance of a sphere of the same diameter, but is much cheaper. http://www.coe.ufrj.br/~acmq/winter.jpgI'm not an expert on capacitance, but I'm assuming that the surface area of the electrodes, the dielectric constant of the insulating material, and the thickness of the dielectric determine the overall capacitance. Do the rules change when we're dealing with high voltage?
Antonio Carlos M. de Queiroz _______________________________________________ Tesla mailing list Tesla@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.pupman.com/mailman/listinfo/tesla