On 10/5/11 5:14 PM, James Hutton wrote:
Hey guys, I have an idea for a science fair I plan on entering this spring.It will involve capacitors, and a few simple car parts.I really need help with this because my knowledge of capacitors sucks...so if anyone would be able to help send me in the right direction I would really appreciate it!email me at b-u-r-t-o-n-boy@xxxxxxxxxxx if your interested!(basically my idea is when you have a half dead car battery that wont start the car, you can charge up a capacitor to send enough power to the ignition coil.... kinda like a flash in a camera) thanks! :) _______________________________________________ Tesla mailing list Tesla@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.pupman.com/mailman/listinfo/tesla
By the way, if you want a more directly Tesla Coiling science project, there's a fair number of ways to do a good one (even though you probably don't want to mention Tesla Coils in the title.. Building a TC is perceived by many as in the same bucket as baking soda/vinegar volcanos)
It's been observed by many that some kinds of primary capacitors change value/loss as the coil runs, ruining the tuning. You could quantify this effect, perhaps trying different kinds of capacitors. There's significant challenges because the HV involved means you need "non-contact" measurement techniques (or at least "isolated")
There are a lot of potential tesla coil projects where you systematically vary some aspect of the design and quantitatively measure the effects. Terry Fritz did some really nice work 15 years or so ago measuring the loss variations on a secondary coil with temperature/humidity (i.e. is cardboard sonotube ok as a secondary form) by measuring the resonant Q.
You could measure the electric field variation as you change topload height and size, and see if Paul Nicholson's analysis and the various finite element programs are correct about voltage and current distributions.
Antonio C.M. de Queiroz has done a bunch of nice analysis of various multiple resonator configurations, which would be a very nice thing to experimentally verify (other than the traditional magnifier, for which there's a fair amount of data.. but that's good for a science project.. Here's the theoretical predictions, here's the data we have previously, here's my new data for the previously untested cases)
Tesla coils (or compact HV power supplies) for extreme environments is another area of potential research. What would a tesla coil look like on Mars? (or at 100,000 ft on earth, which is a similar environment)
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