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Re: [TCML] DC tesla coil
On 6/6/11 12:42 PM, caspina wrote:
Hello,
The charging inductor I use on my DC-coil is made of 8 conventional fluorescent ballasts (58 watt types)in series.
1 ballast can take 1.5kV easily.
These ballasts have an air gap. Performance is great, much better then with my self-wound inductor (on a MOT core).
Total inductance is about 5 Henries.
Hey.. this is a great idea.. "magnetic ballasts" are easy to come by,
and very cheap used, as they get replaced with electronic ballasts.
As you say, they have to hold off the ignition voltage anyway.
Dividing your 5H by 8 ballasts implies that they're on the order of .6 H
each, then?
I suppose the lower the wattage rating the higher the inductance, too
(since they're serving as a current limiter)
My power supply is 6kV (2 MOT's bridge rectified) and I use 28 caps of 220uF/450v in series/parallel for a total of 30uF filtering.
Of course, that's a frightening amount of stored energy.. 30 uF at
9-10kV peak.. a kilojoule or so.. a pretty big bang if it shorts..
I've been thinking of doing something like a rotary converter to drive a
6 pulse rectifier. Or even the AC run capacitor scheme to make the
third phase. That way you don't have nearly as much need for stored
energy in the DC filter.
(too many exploding wire and quarter shrinking experiments.. I'm a big
fan of minimizing stored energy)
I also succeeded in building a triggerable SISG (15 stages @ 1kV each) and I know I'll NEVER go back to a spark gap!
The triggerable sisg allows me to modulate the streamers (ie music)or produce single shots.
The great advantage of the sisg is that you can work with low voltages (relatively speaking, that is)
and it is less complex then a DRSSTC...
Never bad to read from other coilers, I made my TC reading tons of TCML messages, however this is my first post.
Richie's website is a MUST if you go DC-coiling, got great help from there too...
Cheers,
Michael (Belgium)
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