My problem is that I am a chemist instead of an electrical engineer. I took an electronics class at the local city college but everything was 5 volts... very boring. The only things I ever successfully built were a 1/2 wave Tesla coil and a giant Cockroft Walton voltage multiplier that put out a 10 inch arc that sounded like a shotgun blast. I was going to make an accelerator haha, this was almost 60 years ago. Good thing I didn't get past the power supply... never thought of the HV X-rays it would produce. Any way I wasn't thinking of having any reverse current go through the thyratrons; I thought I could just put a Tesla primary in series with a small uf capacitor, charge the capacitor with pulses from the thyratron and a large capacitor and add a pulse every time the ringdown dropped the voltage on the smaller cap. Fantasy? I bought some surplus equipment from LBNL's advanced test accelerator and got a bunch of large CX1538 thyratrons.
Jim
-----Original Message-----
From: David Speck <Dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: homerlea <homerlea@xxxxxxx>; Tesla Coil Mailing List <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sun, Feb 14, 2016 7:06 am
Subject: Re: [TCML] Marx
Jim,
Richard Hull built a TC based on a hydrogen thyratron a number of years
ago. It sorta worked, but was not spectacular.
Thyratrons are not well suited to TC use, because they do not tolerate
reverse direction currents well at all, and degrade quickly. The
oscillating currents in the TC tank circuit travel in both directions
during the ringdown, and the reverse phase damages the tubes.
ISTR that someone tried to use two thyratrons in antiparallel, but
gating them was non-trivial. Basically, a lot of work to make an
inappropriate device perform poorly.
Dave
On 2/14/2016 12:31 AM, homerlea--- via Tesla wrote:
> Does anyone know if I can power a Tesla coil using thyratrons to pulse power from a 20 kvdc power supply/ I just scored some 25 kv thyratrons.
> Jim Heagy
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