William Beaty wrote:
Any regular Tesla coil does this if quenching does not occur in the first notch. The energy stored in the secondary capacitance is returned to the primary capacitor in an "inverse Tesla coil" operation.Hey, have you or others built any BACKWARDS coils? Where a high frequency power supply is turned into huge low frequency DC pulse output? I thought of a way to do this, then remembered that just such things are in schematics in Tesla articles. But I haven't encountered any detailed description in his writings. Wardenclyffe presumably used some similar technique, since it would be putting out pulses well below 10KHz. Also, this may have been the source of those "painless surface flames" discharges described in various articles. Modern plasma generators do the same, I think: huge spikes at low PWM which prevents streamer growth.
The spark gap could be removed, replaced by a short-circuit.It's surely possible to charge the top load of a Tesla coil with a spark from some other source and have the primary capacitor charged to a lower voltage, with small energy loss. With an electronic switch instead of the primary gap it would be possible to disconnect the primary capacitor at its
maximum voltage and use it to power something with pulsed DC. Spark radio receivers were often built as inverse Tesla coils. Antonio Carlos M. de Queiroz _______________________________________________ Tesla mailing list Tesla@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.pupman.com/mailman/listinfo/tesla