RE: TC Spark Energy

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Steve Conner" <steve.conner-at-optosci-dot-com> 

 >The problem is to find the energy to produce a spark of a certain length
 >with a certain TC of a certain design.

Like I said already. From conservation of energy, you can work out the
topload voltage, and from the spark length vs. voltage tables published in
the literature, you can get the spark length for a single shot.

Whether this method extends to John's "controlled spark" idea of sparking
across the biggest gap that allows (almost) every bang to connect, is a
different question. I would say NO, the controlled spark length will be
longer than the single shot length.

Why? As Marco DeNicolai mentioned, when he turns it on, his coil "builds up"
to its full streamer length over 14 bangs. After those 14 bangs, the arc
channel is established, and it could presumably hit the ground stick 3
metres away with every subsequent bang, even though its single shot length
is only about 15-20cm. So we could theorize that Thor's arc channel contains
14 bangs worth of energy, and once it is "full", the suceeding bangs kind of
"top it up".

This kind of gives us some pointers to your original problem. For instance
we could say that the energy needed by Thor to produce a 3 metre controlled
spark is 14 times the bang energy.

So maybe single shot and controlled spark are like two "dimensions" of TC
performance. The former representing how big a bang the coil can give, and
the latter how many bangs it can stick together end-to-end. What causes the
bangs to stick together more or less well is (IMHO) the _really_ interesting
problem, and not very well understood as yet.

My OLTC stuff has been interesting in this regard, I find that the
controlled spark length is only 2.5 to 3 times the single-shot length, as
opposed to Thor's ~15 times. I wonder why :-6

Steve C.