AD-OLTC
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OLTC 2 (Off line Tesla Coil 2) continued The Coil ran Ok at the Gaussfest, but still not much improvement on 2.5'. I did manage to run at full power 2.4KW (10A at 240V) which proved the electronics can stand abuse. So after the Gaussfest I started to look at ways of
increasing the bang energy. This pretty much came down to lowering the
primary inpedance. |
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I also raised the primary up by about 12mm so the base of the primary is now level with the base of the secondary. This should give me more control over the coupling. The Inner of the secondary is drilled so I can adjust the exact height of the secondary RWT the primary. I have also added a strike rail inside the secondary in an attempt to catch any internal arcs before they contact the primary and upset my bricks. This is a spiral of 5mm copper pipe on a disk of 4mm acrylic placed over the primary coil. |
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A
Picture of the OLTC2 from below, just because I like the picture and
to show that I now have 8.46uF of primary capacitance. (18 x 0.47uF = 8 x
0.47uF inside + 10 x 0.47uF outside =
8.46uF) which
gives 4.23 Joules per bang at 1KV |
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The OLTCII ran quite well, but I had all sorts of problems, Mostly due to interferance when arcing to earth tripping the over voltage trip. After a lot of rebuilding and screening, I decided to replace the controller cables with an optic fibre. The improvement was huge, I could arc to earth with no problems. But of course that wasn't the end of the problems. I now had a strange "PING" sound at high powers, and this did blow the HV trip Eventually I pinned this down to being an arc forming on the inside of the secondary. Again after a lot of playing, I found that this was racing sparks. Lowering the coupling sorted out this problem ans I had another session in the testing room (the kitchen). 45" Sparks !!!! |