Hi Bill,
I also toasted an EMI filter early on in my coiling career. I performed a
thoughtful analysis of how I had it wired, and discovered that I had it
hooked up incorrectly. It's not at all obvious what the right way is. I
wrote up the wrong and right ways with an explanation of what makes each
right or wrong. Please see http://www.laushaus.com/tesla/emifilter.htm.
How did you have yours hooked up?
Regards, Gary Lau
MA, USA
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 1:04 PM, Gomez <gomez@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> As part of my effort to build an “ultimate” (to me at least) control panel
> / primary supply
> for “My Last Tesla Coil”, I included a corcom type EMI filter in the
> supply side of the line
> to try to make the coil as “friendly” a load as possible.
>
> During tune up during a recent demo, the primary took a strike, the
> safety gaps didn’t
> fire (that I noticed, it was all over in the blink of an eye) and somehow,
> HV nastiness
> got past the Terry filter, NST, and torched the filter.
>
> During the event _something_ made brief arcing flames inside the panel
> visible through
> the ventilation grill, but there’s no side of physical damage to anything.
>
> I’ve been scratching my head trying to find the path. All components, the
> NST, the Terry
> filter, appear fine. There’s a fine dusting of what looks like smoke
> residue on some
> cables, but I’m damned if I can find any arc or penetration marks
> anywhere. The
> ground of the coil was to earth and isolated from the supply/panel ground.
>
> It seems to me that the strike’s HV had to pass through the Terry filter
> and the NST
> to get to the corcom, but then I would expect damage to those parts.
> Curious.
>
> I have some ideas to improve the situation for next time, but I’m now
> wondering
> whether anyone makes any EMI/RFI filters with rather high voltage peak
> ratings.
> My initial web searches from the usual suspects haven’t turned up any.
>
> I suppose I could put a monster industrial MOV unit at the filter, but
> that seems like
> a bandaid which will just wear out eventually, the way MOVs tend to do.
>
> Ideas?
>
> - Bill “Gomez” Lemieux
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