[TCML] Little white balls within streamers

[bartb]

Hi DC,

It's All Hallows Eve and my wife is handing out the candy (yea!). I 
guess I get some TCML time tonight.

Odd that you mentioned fractals. I was thinking the same about the 
spirals (I think because I watched the show about fractals in nature on 
one of the science channels a day or two before viewing the detail in 
the sparks). On my old pc, I had a fractal software where I could 
manipulate the equation to create various fractals using the main 
Mandelbrot set (boundary) and of course other sets. Really fun to watch 
how the mathematical alterations altered the fractal. Obviously, 
fractals are observed in nature (which is governed by physics), so no 
reason why electrical behavior would be any different (the same physics 
apply).

The spirals could just be wave points (and probably are considering the 
properties of a conductive streamer). It could be the IGBT pulse during 
the image capture (but, I don't think so as bps couldn't have been that 
high). It's actually a relatively quick capture of sparks. The sparks 
shown in that photo is what I actually saw with my eyes during that 
particular strike event. Not a lot of shutter delay or anything like 
that. I had simply turned up the juice and found another sweet spot (so 
to speak) in the bps rate. An odd thing occurred shortly after. The 
sparks stopped (out of nowhere). I immediately turned down the juice and 
sparks ignited again. Seems there is a point where the bps just gets too 
fast and everything stops. I tried this a few times and the same thing 
occurred. Possibly a phenomenon of running a low Cp value with the SISG? 
Not sure.

I think for longer sparks, I've got to up the capacitance. One really 
cool observation is that those low cost IGBT's are doing just fine. I 
haven't had a board component die. Maybe the board quirks that others 
have had is due to high Cp and associated high energy through the gates. 
As far as I can tell so far, low Cp IGBT coils do just fine (when I say 
"low", I mean lower than the normally huge Cp used).

Take care,
Bart

DC Cox wrote:
> Perhaps energy vortices, similar to vortices in a fast running stream.
> Mathematical equivalent using fractals.
>
> Dr. Resonance
>
> On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 7:16 PM, bartb <bartb at classictesla.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> http://www.classictesla.com/photos/sisg/sisg-spark005.jpg
>>
>> Just seemed interesting