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Registered Member #3324
Joined: Sun Oct 17 2010, 06:57PM
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Posts: 1276
Hello all,
Recently I have been speculating upon a certain idea. After watching a YouTube video of someone placing a radioactive element near a spark gap and getting it to fire due to the ionizing radiation. I was curious. How would this work when it came to a tesla coil breakout point. Could there be any interesting effects? More interesting, if you put an actual pointy breakout pin on one side of a tesla coil, and a small radioactive isotope on the other, which will it choose to arc from?
I don't actually have a tesla coil (yet) or said radioactive isotope, but I'm sure a few of you out there have both! Would anyone be interested in giving it a try?
Also, I have tried thoriated tig electrodes as breakout points, and they work fine, but perform no better than non-radioactive breakouts. The reason being is that the thoriation helps with thermionic emission and arc stabilization at DC, not at arc initiation. I chose the WTh electrodes because they're cheap and my steel electrodes were oxidizing and rusting once they got hot from multi-kW runs.
The level of radiation you need to achieve air ionization is dangerous. That's what the original measurement of radiation, Roentgens, was - measurement of degree of ionization of air. Also, you have to choose the isotope for its decay method, as each decay method has a different ionization coefficient and a different mean-free-path in air. Again, it's quite a futile endeavor due to safety hazards and negligible benefits.
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Radioactive Tesla coil breakoff point.
