[TCML] Telsa coils + capacitor bank = ?

[Josh Bailey <josh@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Bert;

I recently made friends with Greg Leyh and attended the recent Norcal 
Teslathon - 'twas grand (I made my first tiny coil back in July so have 
had a... rapid introduction to the field).

While there we worked on using Greg's largest coil to strike a graphite 
rod, connected to ~100uF of capacitors charged to ~20kV.

I had some naive questions about what we observed, and Greg suggested you 
might have some interpretations? I'm a network engineer by trade so please 
forgive being a newbie - just want to understand what is happening.

Here are two series' of photos (frames from an MJPEG capture running at 
about 30 fps):

http://vandervecken.com/images/capbanktest1/
http://vandervecken.com/images/capbanktest2/

Q1. What conditions must exist for the capacitor bank to discharge? We 
noticed that sometimes the graphite was struck multiple times before it 
discharged. We also noticed that sometimes the bank was not fully 
discharged (still had 3-4kV on it).

Q2. What is the sequence of events at discharge?

Q3. The arc changes colour several times (before and after the strike). 
What's going on there?

Q4. I was thinking about trying to get a better photographic record of 
what's happening - other than longer lenses/faster cameras etc - please 
might you have any suggestions on how to better capture what's going on?

Thanks,

-- 
Josh Bailey (josh@xxxxxxxxxxxx)
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