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RE: AVERAGE power revisited



Original poster: "John H. Couture by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>" <couturejh-at-worldnet.att-dot-net>


Gary -

The trouble with using "power processor" is that it is not distinctive
enough a name to differentiate from "energy processor". Both power and
energy are processed in a Tesla coil. The difference, of course is in the
time involved. When I refer to power gain I usually mention that there is no
energy gain or "free energy or over unity energy".

The wattmeter and watthour meters are two different types of meters. The
usual electromagnetic type of wattmeter cannot show instantaneous watts but
an electronic type can. Also an oscilloscope can be made to show
instantaneous (peak) watts. The watthour meter can not show instantaneous
watts. The wattmeter is the best meter to use for Tesla coil inputs but
cannot be used for the TC output.

Some coilers have measured the current in the output of a Tesla coil. They
even went so far as to make a guesstimate of the output voltage to obtain
the KW output. I show in one of my books one method of finding the output
current and a method of estimating the output voltage. However, the TC
output voltage has always got to be only an estimate so the KW output is
always an estimate.

I agree the energy in an hours worth of sparks will be less than the energy
recorded on your wattmeter. However, as I said before the instantaneous
output wattage will be more (a gain) than the instantaneous input wattage
with a properly working TC.

For example, the fixed energy per bang with the 3 KW/1700 KW example is

   3000 x 1 = 3000 watt seconds input

The output energy is

    1.7x10^6 x 400x10^-6 = 680 watts output

This is an efficiency of   680/3000 = 22.7%  Tesla coils of this size run
about this efficiency. The three scientist that built this TC said 25% but
gave no details.

The power gain would be   P = 1700/3000 = 566.7

As I have never seen calcs of this nature before for Tesla coils I expect I
will be getting some feedback. How would you teach it?

John Couture

--------------------------------


-----Original Message-----
From: Tesla list [mailto:tesla-at-pupman-dot-com]
Sent: Monday, January 08, 2001 9:56 PM
To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
Subject: AVERAGE power revisited


Original poster: "Gary Johnson by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>"
<gjohnson-at-ksu.edu>

John, Terry, Harvey:

-------------------------   snip


John, you ask about power gain. I think you understand it correctly, but I
would probably use the term "power processor" instead.  Power gain might be
interpreted as implying over unity operation, or "free energy", which I
don't think you want to say.  As you know, the primary capacitor accepts
power from the power company relatively slowly (a quarter cycle of the
60(50) Hz wave) and then discharges it rapidly. The input current waveform
is not sinusoidal, but it can be considered to consist of a 60(50) Hz
fundamental plus harmonics.  The watthour meter acts as a low pass filter
and basically just responds to the fundamental.  If the reading on the
watthour meter increases by 1 kWh in 1 hour of operation, then we say you
have used an average power of 1 kW. This idea of energy divided by time
works all the way down to one cycle, so we could talk about the average
power for 1/60 of a second and still be mathematically correct. Of course,
if your coil does not fire every cycle, the value you arrive at for a given
cycle may not be representative.

As far as I know, the energy in an hour's worth of sparks will be less than
the energy recorded on your watthour meter. However, the sparks are not
continuous, but exist only a small fraction of the time. When you take the
energy in a spark divided by the time of existence, the power will be much
higher. I hate to use the term average power for the spark since it is
intermittant and variable, preferring peak power or instantaneous power
instead. You asked about 3 kW in (average) and 1700 kW out (peak). I
certainly have no problem with those numbers.

----------------------------  snip


Gary Johnson