High Voltage Projects
High Voltage experiments and projects can be extremely dangerous and shouldn't be attempted without a good working knowledge and understanding of the risks.
(1) DRSSTC: To mimic the bigger coils out there, dual resonant is the way forward. This complicates the design and, as always with Tesla Coils stresses the electronics. This design is based on the medium sized coil with a 150mm diameter secondary. The overall length is also up to 660mm. This arrangement reduced the resonant frequency to around 100kHz for the bare coil. The top load reducing this to 80kHz. To allow higher operating powers IGBT block modules are used. Not only are these designed to handle higher currents they also don't produce the hot shrapnel on failure that individual IGBTs tend to. However, they still fail and cost a lot more. At the moment, the coil is fitted with a 10A breaker so limiting the consumption to about 2kW. This energy should be good for about 1m length sparks
(2) VTTC Vacuum tube TC are one of my favourite designs. While not generally great for long arcs they can run in CW mode and are more forgiving in fault conditions. Their primaries run at higher voltage so pose a significant extra danger not that any Primary voltages are safer
HF High Voltage supplies are always useful for various experiments and having high frequency outputs makes for interesting experiments while keeping the size of the power supply small. These can be easily made with old Line Output Transformers form early TVs where the rectifier was separate, as shown in the last image (5).
(3) High Voltage supplies Show here is technically another small VTTC this oscillator uses a PL504 television line tube driving the air-core transformer. The HF field lights the neon tube close by, but also lights the LED lamp sitting on the transformer. This is interesting as we associate LEDs as low voltage current devices yet it lights here and isn't damaged by the high voltage field.
(4) 100kV X-ray transformer shown, modified to give a variable + or - output.
(5) Line Out-Put Transformer is shown in the last picture. These are particularly nice as the can produce a HF HV directly from the secondary. These were commonly used in old valve TVs or where the multiplier or rectifier was separate.
