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Registered Member #87
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 01:36PM
Location: San Jose
Posts: 191
I remeber some talk somewhere of placing a capacitor in series with your coils ground connection to increase ground strike power, has anyone tried it? Any thoughts?
Registered Member #223
Joined: Mon Feb 20 2006, 06:42PM
Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Posts: 125
At high frequencies a capacitor would act like a piece of wire. (e.g. Short) so I don't think it would do anything. When I was too lazy to pound a copper stake into the ground I would just use a few square feet of aluminum foil to capacitivly couple the secondary to earth. I noticed no difference in preformence using a copper stake in the ground or a few ft^2 of aluminum foil.
Registered Member #146
Joined: Sun Feb 12 2006, 04:21AM
Location: Austin Tx
Posts: 1055
The idea is that the capacitor will allow ground currents to pass to earth as usual, but you can put a large DC component on the capacitor, and have it discharge through the TC secondary, through the ground sparks. You obviously do NOT want to contact the output of the tesla coil in this case.
For starters you could try something around a few nF at 40-50kV. Perhaps charge it up with a TV flyback. You might want to isolate the flyback from the capacitor with some HV resistors. Maybe i'll try this myself with my DRSSTC.
Im pretty sure EVR did this with his small coil, and i think even posted a schematic of how he did it.
Registered Member #223
Joined: Mon Feb 20 2006, 06:42PM
Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Posts: 125
Ah I see what you mean now. Maybe I should give it a try. I have a few 570pF 40kv door knob capacitors. But I don't think the few extra J would do much though. The arc would probably be a little bit brighter and louder. However my TC as is already drowns out the spark gap and I'm not sure if I really want anything louder. One thing I'm concerned about is that the inductance of the tesla coil would lengthen discharge times; Thus making is not as spectacular as it could be if I used the same caps in a marx generator.
I would like to see someone use a large pulse cap (say 10-30uf at 50kv. which would probably blow a small coil apart) in such and arrangement. Sort of like a bug zapper but on a more human scale "Tesla Security Systems"
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Ground Capacitors
"Tesla Security Systems"
