Lau, Gary skrev:
Hi Daz, That's some beautiful construction you have there - a real showpiece. While your spark gap IS a work of art, it does not constitute the best practices that have been demonstrated to achieve best performance. With your spark gap, the arc is always in the same place. Even though the parts are not puny, arcing at the same place will cause localized heating, which will affect the breakdown voltage of the gap. There will also be rapid wear at the point of arcing. With the arc in the same place and no airflow, the hot, ionized air following each bang will affect (reduce) the breakdown voltage of subsequent bangs. Using two parallel pipes as electrodes causes the arcing to be distributed over the length of the pipes. And forced airflow improves performance more. The two spheres gap works well for safety gaps, as these (hopefully) fine only infrequently and won't get hot. Regards, Gary Lau MA, USA
I agree with Gary, hereBiggest problem is that it appears that you have used brass for the electrodes. They will show some ugly pitting almost instantly after running, and thus the breakdown voltage will lower.
Generous surfaces of copper seems to work best.You would get better results by simply letting 2 pieces of rod, with rounded edges, meet with a gap. Spark gaps made from solid copper, with nicely rounded edges, have given me the best performance in the past. If you have access to rectangular copper stock, often found in large electrical racks, use it! You can screw 3 pieces to 3 heat sink fins, and make a nice 2 section gap. Using this approach, with 2" by 3/8" copper stock, I have produced up to 2 meters of spark. That´s around 7 feet.
Hope this helps, Cheers, Finn Hammer Cheers, Finn Hammer _______________________________________________ Tesla mailing list Tesla@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.pupman.com/mailman/listinfo/tesla