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Chris,
It's a very challenging design problem. And, the divider will be quite
sensitive to changes in the surrounding E-field. Since TC sparks create
shifting space charge regions with corresponding fluctuating E-fields in
the surrounding air, accurate direct measurements can be done only if
the Tesla coil is not actively creating streamers/leaders.
Many years ago, Marco Denicolai designed a compensated voltage divider
to measure the output voltage of his large Tesla Coil. His divider used
an aqueous resistor combined with E-field and distributed capacitance
modeling. His divider was suspended from the ceiling directly above his
TC toroid. His paper and some other information can still be found on
his web site:
There are other methods for indirectly estimating the output voltage,
but again these apply only to non-sparking TC's. These typically include
E-field measurements or computing output from secondary base current
measurements. A search of the Pupman archives will show many discussions
over the years about pros and cons of various measurement approaches.
Bert
Chris Boden wrote:
Ignoring limitations of cost and size, is it possible to build a large
precision voltage divider (imagine something inside a 10' tall PVC pipe on
a stand with a toroid in top) that would be able to accurately measure the
output voltages of medium-sized Tesla Coils?
Thoughts? Details? Design/method/parts suggestions?
Has anyone ever done this before at the hobbiest level?