styropyro patreon

quick outdoor run of eye searing goodness

🕑 Added 2023-01-14 17:25:57 +0000 UTC

Comments

Casi

Jeeeeeeeeez

Sean Daggett

This is a great angle with you peeking in the corner with that devlish smile.

Carl Lumma

Can you estimate the power dissipation associated with your arcs? Edit: I agree your arcs are whiter & brighter. Lower voltage would suggest more resistive heating, but somehow I guess that's not much of a factor, since you get low resistence as soon as the air ionizes (right?).

styropyro

That's a spark gap coil that has about 3x higher average power draw than my coil here. It's pulsed in nature with very high peak power. Surprisingly, it looks like my coil has higher current output than that one, both in peak and average. I would bet my coil has brighter arcs to ground due to this, as well as the fact that my coil is running close to CW (50% duty cycle at 60Hz). Note how the arcs from my coil are white, driven mainly by thermal emission. This is rare from a tesla coil. In fact, you can see left over thermal plasmas after an arc extinguishes, further attesting to the large amount of hot plasma being produced. Another probable factor for bright arcs is that my coil has substantially lower output voltage. You'd think this would hinder brightness, but in reality, I think it promotes more resistance heating of the arc as opposed to "wasting" energy on further ionization.