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Re: [TCML] Silent Spark Gap



On 6/5/13 10:13 PM, Amir Mojarradi wrote:

Hi everyone,


Is there anyway to build an enclosure around the spark gap in a small SGTC in order to muffle the noise as much as possible?


Sure.. you can put it in a box with some baffles to keep the sound from propagating out through the cooling vents.

You can also build a sealed gap.. the key is having sufficiently good thermal conductivity to get the heat away. Typically, the gap dissipates about half the power in the coil, so if you have a NST driven coil at, say 400W, then the gap needs to dissipate 200W. That's a fairly decent sized heatsink/cooling fins/airflow.

If you don't cool the gap well enough, the electrode surfaces get hot spots, and the gap will fire too easily, and may not ever really quench.

The stack of disks multigap is well known for being fairly silent, but is also pretty lossy, because each of the little subgaps contributes a cathode drop of 50V-100V or so, and stacking those up makes for a lossy gap.

http://home.earthlink.net/~jimlux/hv/hvtrigsg.htm has a diagram at the bottom. There are some tricks to getting it hydrogen filled without needing to buy hydrogen. Hydrogen has the advantage of being a really good thermal conductor AND having low cathode drop. You run the gap in an atmosphere of alcohol vapor, and the spark breaks down the alcohol to make hydrogen.

The usual description for filling works like this.. you build the gap and put it in the enclosure. you pour in the alcohol and heat the whole thing up until the alcohol starts to vaporize and the vapor displaces all the air, while the vapor is still coming out, you close the container up (crimp the tube, put the cap on, whatever), and then you let it cool.





I am building a small coil for display in an office setting and want to keep it as quiet as possible...


Thank you,


Amir Mojarradi
Los Angeles, CA
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