CW Tesla Plasma
So not a lot has been happening on the plasma front. I have been waiting for new glass which I finally got last week. Meanwhile I have been playing with tesla coils still hoping to get a coil that drives plasma well.
A few weeks back i made a half bridge coil intended to run at about 400-500kHz. It uses a technique that synchronizes the start pulse for the coil (for some reason it's called an interrupter) with the line voltage. this result in a spark that grows linearly as the line voltage ramps up making a sword shaped spark. It's the same sort of thing my first SSTC was made to do but I mistakenly set it up to work at too low a frequency for the sword sparks to happen.
It was very interesting making a coil like this from scratch. the earlier coil was from a purchased PC board and I only understood roughly how it worked. Now after a few weeks of building and testing I understand the principles of a coil much better. And I only killed one bridge...
Meanwhile I was looking for a bridge PC board that I could buy to make my set-up more compact. I found one for a smaller coil that was CW. I bought a few boards and built up the coil last week. It worked just fine at turn-on and does a good job driving plasma globes.
The unit is a half bridge running off of full wave rectified AC. the bridge is driven by a dual MOSFET driver chip and the clock is from a signal generator. I am debating on whether to close the loop and make it self oscillating.
The plasma glass are a Kr/I2 globe, a Ne/I2 tube and a pure Xe tube. the only downside to the coil as a plasma driver is how noisy it is. 120Hz is pretty annoying.
Cheers.
CW Tesla Plasma
So not a lot has been happening on the plasma front. I have been waiting for new glass which I finally got last week. Meanwhile I have been playing with tesla coils still hoping to get a coil that drives plasma well.
A few weeks back i made a half bridge coil intended to run at about 400-500kHz. It uses a technique that synchronizes the start pulse for the coil (for some reason it's called an interrupter) with the line voltage. this result in a spark that grows linearly as the line voltage ramps up making a sword shaped spark. It's the same sort of thing my first SSTC was made to do but I mistakenly set it up to work at too low a frequency for the sword sparks to happen.
It was very interesting making a coil like this from scratch. the earlier coil was from a purchased PC board and I only understood roughly how it worked. Now after a few weeks of building and testing I understand the principles of a coil much better. And I only killed one bridge...
Meanwhile I was looking for a bridge PC board that I could buy to make my set-up more compact. I found one for a smaller coil that was CW. I bought a few boards and built up the coil last week. It worked just fine at turn-on and does a good job driving plasma globes.
The unit is a half bridge running off of full wave rectified AC. the bridge is driven by a dual MOSFET driver chip and the clock is from a signal generator. I am debating on whether to close the loop and make it self oscillating.
The plasma glass are a Kr/I2 globe, a Ne/I2 tube and a pure Xe tube. the only downside to the coil as a plasma driver is how noisy it is. 120Hz is pretty annoying.
Cheers.