Scott,
Its taken years of "learning" to avoid the very same problem David is
having.
The problem is simply this, your RF ground is bouncing by many kV relative
to other power supplies or line voltage. This stresses the insulation
between diode and heatsink until it blows up.... David knows this now :-).
For DRSSTCs its common practice now to use "RF bypass" capacitors between
the power bus and "ground" so that there cannot be large transient
potential that stresses the silicon isolation. Being initially clueless
about this issue explains a lot of my IGBT grave yard
:-). So it really comes down to using pretty standard EMI suppression
techniques to avoid blowing things up around tesla coils.
Steve
On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 7:30 AM, Scott Bogard <sdbogard@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> David,
> Glad you got that sorted out, it does make me wonder though, how do
> folks manage to build DRSSTCs and not have all the components explode...
> I'm wondering if you could leave hte brick grounded if it was in a cage or
> something, though I suspect not. At any rate, good job!
>
> Scott Bogard.
>
>
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