RE: Longitudinal Waves

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

Original poster: "David Thomson by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <dave-at-volantis-dot-org>

Hi Malcolm,

>Maybe we are not talking about the same thing. I can induce ringing in a
typical TC resonator and watch it ring down. I can vary ringdown times from
>10mS if the Q of the circuit is high enough to as short as I want by
increasing its resistive losses. I don't need longitudinal waves to explain
that result do I?

The ring down envelope has nothing to do with the longitudinal wave.  It is
still a part of the voltage.  The longitudinal wave is not electromotive
force.  In fact, I keep coming down to the idea that longitudinal waves are
electrostatic force.

It seems to me that the very first moment of the pulse is electrostatic,
then there is the damped wave that is electromotive, and then the wave
returns to electrostatic after the electromotive force has damped out.
Perhaps the electrostatic nature of the wave is always there, but the
electromotive force overwhelms the electrostatic during its short life span?

Tonight I hooked up my wye coil.  It's three parallel wires wound in a flat
spiral secondary and all three leads are joined at the terminal.  I decided
to operate the coil with no secondary ground and with the terminal connected
to an electrostatically sealed 30" diameter flat aluminum disk.  I have a
1/4" layer of Plexiglas plus 1/4" of hot glue separating the primary and
secondary, and even with this nearly 500,000 volts of dielectric, I was
still getting an arc between primary and secondary.  This, and no sparks at
the terminal.  My thought is that I have succeeded in generating an
electrostatic (longitudinal) wave of high pressure.

Indeed, the plasma globe shows concentric spheres of light as though
spherical standing waves separated the layers.  The color was an eerie
green.

The way standard solenoid coils are wound and configured, the object is to
increase the resonant rise of the voltage.  This is what causes the long
sparks.  Voltage tends to be near the terminal and current tends to be near
the ground wire.

Flat spiral coils do not break out sparks easily unless an object is brought
near the terminal, such as the outer lead or a hand held fluorescent tube.
This is probably due to voltage being mostly between the outer windings,
which is near where the ground wire would normally be.  The terminal is
highly positively charged.  But this is where the research needs to be done.
It is tempting to call the strong electrostatic charge a high voltage, but
it doesn't behave like a solenoid voltage peak.  It behaves like a
longitudinal wave.

If I remove my 30" electrostatically sealed disk from the terminal and
connect a standard copper ball, the charge of the ball is leaked into the
air and there is no arcing between the primary and secondary.  If the high
pressure being exerted against the terminal were voltage oscillations, there
would be long streamers breaking out.  But there are none.  If the high
pressure were longitudinal waves, then the charge would be overstuffed into
the flat disk causing a pressure in the disk with back pressure on the
terminal and thus higher pressures within the secondary.  And this is what
appears to be evident due to arcing through 500,000 volts of dielectric.

It's getting late.  I'll give this some more thought and measurement
tomorrow.

Dave