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Re: 20 joules at 100 bps vs 4 joules at 500 bps



Original poster: Steve Conner <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx>


Why is there such a sharp
knee if you were to plot voltage (primary) vs spark length?


Who knows? I guess there is a certain critical field strength below which leaders (we agreed not to call them streamers any more) can't propagate. If the coil produces a fairly uniform field strength over most of the space it's in, then you would hit this critical field quite suddenly, and the sparks would leap out all at once. (and woe betide anyone in Steve's hot tub when it happens)

A small coil with a small toroid might produce a less uniform field, in which case the jump wouldn't be as sudden. The "magic field strength" would be achieved nearest the toroid first and then it would spread out as the voltage was cranked up.

I have also noticed something like it. Out of all the knobs I have to twiddle on all my coils, I've never seen any that has such a drastic effect as the voltage knob. But I have never seen it go "Bam" all at once in the space of 50v.

Maybe your coil is switching poles when the streamer-oops leader-no that doesn't sound right-discharge loading gets above a certain amount? A test for this would be to see if the discharge shrinks when turning the voltage down, at the same voltage that made it grow so dramatically on the way up. If it was mode hopping, I expect there would be hysteresis.


> then maybe you`ll explain, what is so"interestingly"

Father Dest, it's about time you built a coil for yourself, then you will see what is so interestingly about them ;) It's very easy to get caught up in trying to analyse everything. But at the end of the day our simulations are only as accurate as our streamer- oops leader- growth model, which seems not very accurate at all.

So might as well just build lots of different kinds and sizes of coils and see what they do. We will probably find out lots of cool results in the process that will help the analysis guys.

That's what I think anyway.


Steve Conner