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Registered Member #1845
Joined: Fri Dec 05 2008, 05:38AM
Location: California
Posts: 211
I decided to run my spark gap coil for an extended period of time yesterday to check its reliability. Its a quality spark gap coil. It has a terry filter, 45 capacitors in the MMC, its extremely well tuned, and has a rotary SG at 120 Hz.
So the point of my experiment was to see "How long can this coil run before something blows?"
CONCLUSION: The coil ran for 1.5 hours, and nothing failed, so at that point I just shut it off by myself and ended the experiment. I then did a heat check of its components. The capacitors were really not even warm. They were just above room temp. I was tapping the primary with a stainless steel clip, and it wasn't even hot. In fact, it was room temperature. So essentially, there was basically no heating of anything. I must say that I was impressed with a 1.5 Hour Run and Zero heating.
So how long would the coil have run if I left it going past the 1.5 hour mark. Who knows? Maybe 3hrs.,,,,, maybe 24hrs. I don't really know. The main cause of failure for SGTC's, I would think, would be the MMC.
Has anyone ever done such a reliability test on any type of tesla coil, and if so, what were your results?
Registered Member #477
Joined: Tue Jun 20 2006, 11:51PM
Location: Seattle, WA
Posts: 546
Oh, certainly. TCML records a few such durability experiments. Terry Fritz, one of the founding fathers of MMCs, did some pretty in-depth testing of various MMC caps and attributed lifespans (in Tesla service) to them (e.g., for the famous CDE 942 caps before they were so famous). For some time, they were in one of his papers up on hot-streamer.com, however that site was recently taken down. I know that somebody got a dump of all the content from that site and shared it out somewhere, but I'm forgetting the details. I'm sure you could find it if you poked around a bit, or perhaps somebody will chime in.
Did you attempt to keep track of streamer length before and after the 1.5-hour run?
Registered Member #1845
Joined: Fri Dec 05 2008, 05:38AM
Location: California
Posts: 211
Did you attempt to keep track of streamer length before and after the 1.5-hour run?
Were you thinking that the MMC cap value may have dropped slightly, thus putting the coil slightly out of tune, or were you thinking that excessive heating of components would have decreased efficiency and had some effect on spark length. Well, the spark length was exactly the same.
In fact, the conditions I was running the coil in during the 1.5 hour run were not even ideal. There was a slight breeze. I didn't have a breakout point, so the breeze kept kicking the sparks around the toroid, and didn't allow for the production of large bunches of sparks in one spot.
Once again, if anyone has left a coil on for a very long time, I'd be curious to hear your results.
Registered Member #477
Joined: Tue Jun 20 2006, 11:51PM
Location: Seattle, WA
Posts: 546
Yeah, I was wondering if you'd noticed any degradation in the spark length, such as might be caused by the coil de-tuning, gap electrodes fouling, etc.
SteveC wrote ...
Once again, if anyone has left a coil on for a very long time, I'd be curious to hear your results.
Once again: TCML This was among the first few hits when I searched for "long run": (although this doesn't include a lot of interesting data, mainly intuitive observation--I didn't look too hard). Here's another thread about the durability (in hours) of various pulse caps: (Nothing to Terry's paper, but I'm sure I could find that too with a bit more poking around).
Not a lot of SGTC research going on these days, so when you've got a sort of historical SGTC-type query, TCML is (IMO) the first place to turn. Not that there isn't plenty of interesting experience here, but solid state stuff dominates.
In fact, if you're really interested, you might re-ask this question on TCML. I bet half a dozen people with long-run experience would pounce on it straight away.
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SGTC Reliability Test
This was among the first few hits when I searched for "long run": 