Hi Tyler,
The growling noise in the clip is from a saturating transformer core.
Your setup is very destructive to the transformer, a series resonant circuit
where the JL spark gap is a part of the circuit in series with the
transformer, ballast and capacitor. There is nothing to remove the energy
once the resonance is set up, the ballast feeds more energy from the
electric grid continually into the resonance once started. The energy will
build up until the core saturates, and then the transformer will go into a
chaotic ferroresonance state, that is well known among power distribution
engineers to kill transformers. It kills the transformer either by
overheating the core, or more prabable in your case, by overvolting the HV
winding until it flashes over between adjacent turns.
In the usual SGTC setup the tank capacitor is also connected to the
transformer and forms a potential resonance circuit, but the regular spark
gap, and hopefully also the safety gap, will remove the energy quickly if a
resonant condition would occur. In your circuit the JL spark gap can not
remove the energy, as it is connected in series inside the resonant circuit.
The fact that the spark in the JL gap is weak in the latter part of the clip
shows that the energy goes elswhere, in your case into the saturating core
losses, and probably also into an internal flashover in the HV winding.
Sorry for your loss, but it was a bad setup. Do not use a capacitor in a JL
setup, unless there is a safety gap across the transformer HV winding.
Jan
Stockholm, Sweden
--------------------------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2019 15:41:16 -0600
From: Tyler LaVite <tlavite@xxxxxxxxx>
To: Tesla Coil Mailing List <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [TCML] Pole transformer repair
Message-ID: <64A6EFD9-7FD0-4734-927F-E1DD3A92C32E@xxxxxxxxx>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
I forgot I had my camera rolling when my transformer messed up.... two
things to point out one the arc noise with the cap, two that arc isn?t even
remotely close to as large as it normally is without the capacitor, and two
notice the loud pop the last time I turn it on and hear the ballast humming
loud. That pop would make sense with the one damaged spot I found where the
paper was burned and blown out on the outer winding. But fixing that did
nothing.
https://youtu.be/O21C4Yf9V2E
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