Re: "Gas burner" corona from STSG driver

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

Original poster: "Ed Phillips by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <evp-at-pacbell-dot-net>

> Early X-Ray power supplies were indeed mostly induction coils, but
> electrostatic machines were also used for some time, due to the
> pure DC output, particularly convenient when the images were
> directly observed through a fluoroscope. Some old texts even say that
> with pure DC there were no problems with "X-ray burns" (they were
> wrong, unfortunately for many experimenters).

	Any idea about the relative cost of a big electrostatic machine and an
"induction coil"?  Seems to me the latter would have been much cheaper
and done the job satisfactorily.  As for the X-Ray burns, I have an old
(circa 1905) magazine article somewhere which discusses the various
possible types of burns and states that some are benign and some are
harmful!!!  Little did the guys know.

> About the secondary voltage with as low inverse as possible, this
> only makes sense as "without inversions before the spark occurs".
> Without sparks (or other nonlinearities) the average output is always
> zero.
> The relatively tight coupling of these coils cause the output
> voltage to rise to the maximum value at the first swing, while in
> a Tesla coil there are always at least one (for k=0.6) polarity
> reversal before the output voltage reaches the maximum absolute value.
> 
> Antonio Carlos M. de Queiroz

	Of course the induced voltage in a transformer must have zero average. 
In the course of playing with various ignition-coil drivers I've done
quite a bit of looking at secondary waveform and in the cases where I've
used inverse-diode damping across the primary see at least a four to one
ratio of first peak to second peak.  If I had a safe HV probe I'd
probably know more.

Ed