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Re: Racing sparks at low power...



Original poster: Steve Conner <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

Hi Curt

I found on my DRSSTC, I would get sparks from the middle of the secondary to the primary when running at very high bang energy and low breakrate. When using roughly the same energy at high breakrate, the coil worked properly.

I put this down to the heavy air ionisation and big streamers formed at high breakrates causing the coil to be loaded more heavily and dragging its output voltage down. At low breakrates the streamers were smaller and thinner, the output voltage went higher, causing a correspondingly higher voltage all along the coil, and this caused the flashovers. It was Steve Ward that originally proposed this explanation.

Do you have a static gap? If you do, then decreasing the input voltage lowers the breakrate without decreasing the bang energy (because bang energy depends on voltage, and the static gap's firing voltage is more or less constant) so this would probably explain what's going on.

Steve

Tesla list <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Original poster: "C. Sibley"

I've noticed that occasionally when I am powering down
my coil that I will get a breakout from the middle of
the secondary to the primary, or racing sparks. This
happens on the way down at low input voltages just
before the gap stops firing.

The coil runs clean at full power. Any idea what
causes this phenomenon?

Thanks,

Curt.