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Author Topic: A Kapanadze generator replication - Febuary 2013  (Read 290952 times)

TinselKoala

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Re: A Kapanadze generator replication - Febuary 2013
« Reply #120 on: March 18, 2013, 03:26:36 PM »
Me too.

It is possible that you are underestimating the importance of a properly functioning spark gap. Also, for best power throughput you will want relatively loose coupling between your main primary and your secondary. Many many coats of insulating varnish (Krylon) on your secondary will help keep the voltage where it belongs. The secondary must be grounded to the Earth, either at the bottom for the standard Tesla coil configuration or at the center tap for the Odin-style double coil. The instantaneous currents in the primary can be very  large, kiloamperes even, which is why you need heavy conductors and good contacts for your primary. 1/4 inch diameter soft copper tubing is good, copper ribbon (reduces self-inductance) is even better. Thin wires like #12 solid copper can be used for a primary but won't work as well.
Do not try to rectify the output of the secondary unless you have a rectifier that can withstand at least a megavolt... which is unlikely. If you rectify the _input_ to your primary coil-capacitor tank, then you are no longer dealing with a system that requires the capacitor to charge fully during one AC input cycle and you can use a larger capacitor, hence requiring fewer turns for your primary.
For optimum performance you will want a spark gap that quenches (turns _off_) as rapidly as possible. If you are using a rotary spark gap with AC supply to your primary tank, you will encounter "picket-fencing" that will produce no output at all at certain vaues of BPS. Rectifying the tank input solves this problem and allows more freedom in gap rotation BPS. If you have a high-current supply then your sparks will "trail" in the gap and won't quench properly, vastly reducing the output of the secondary, so this means your electrode spacing and paths have to be constructed with prevention of arc-trailing in mind.
300-400 kHz is already getting into the "high end" of frequency for a spark-gap coil. As you go up in frequency the characteristics of the secondary emissions change and tuning becomes more critical.
You don't have to "spark that fast"; the secondary should make many cycles at its resonant frequency during each spark interval of the primary tank circuit. Ideally, with AC supply to the tank, you would like the capacitor to charge fully during one cycle of the mains supply frequency and have the spark gap fire just at the peak of the charging voltage from your primary transformer: once every full (or half) cycle of the mains frequency, 50 or 60 Hz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTaIj5qLoH0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTLFlRhsa5U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjc9ilOAaQU

Of course, if you are trying for something other than extreme voltage and power throughput, you can ignore all of the above.

TinselKoala

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Re: A Kapanadze generator replication - Febuary 2013
« Reply #121 on: March 18, 2013, 04:25:38 PM »
The two spark shots above were taken at 1/15 second exposure. Since the DC coming out of the FWB is unfiltered, there is a strong 120 Hz ripple on this DC -- in fact, a 0 V to 3 kV ripple, about. In 1/15 of a second, there is time for 8 of the ripple peaks entering the tank to charge and spark, charge and spark.... and you can see very clearly the 8 sub-streamers in the psarks. Each of those substreamers is itself made up of substreamers generated at the coil's resonant frequency, far too fast for the camera to capture.

DreamThinkBuild

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Re: A Kapanadze generator replication - Febuary 2013
« Reply #122 on: March 18, 2013, 06:22:37 PM »
Hi TinselKoala,

Nice build, that is pretty cool.  8)

Farmhand

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Re: A Kapanadze generator replication - Febuary 2013
« Reply #123 on: March 18, 2013, 07:04:27 PM »
Good tips Tinsel, Can you give any tips on the camera settings, ISO, aperture, ambient light ect. I see similar arcs with multiple ripples but I find it difficult to capture them well by pictures, I need to use longer exposure times, I have only a (Fuji FinePix S5700) camera.

Anyway I was messing with a couple of other coils I had made for LV experiments and got two incandescent bulbs to light partially. The interesting thing I noticed was the different look to the light or the way the globes worked. They seemed to fill the entire inside of the bulb with an even light, the lower voltage one seems to pour the light out almost like onto the surface of the wood it was on, the filament kind of disappears in a ball of light, the 240 volt bulb only get's yellow but it is kind of the same.
Long way to go yet but I got some filaments to glow at least already.  :)

There's a blurry picture showing the odd way the lights light up attached.

This is the spark gap coil, it's pretty heavy duty, 2 x 6 mm primary turn 370 diameter and the rest is one mm wire I think from memory the secondary has 40 turns and the extra coil has about 170 maybe a few more, can't recall. Supply is two anti parallel MOT's with a DC resonant charging circuit, 12 nF primary cap.
http://i227.photobucket.com/albums/dd168/Toey1/TClights2009.jpg

Here's a video clip showing how it's setup ect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y1U1PSmAjQ

Please forgive the messy area and bad camera work.

Lakes

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Re: A Kapanadze generator replication - Febuary 2013
« Reply #124 on: March 18, 2013, 09:09:22 PM »
The two spark shots above were taken at 1/15 second exposure. Since the DC coming out of the FWB is unfiltered, there is a strong 120 Hz ripple on this DC -- in fact, a 0 V to 3 kV ripple, about. In 1/15 of a second, there is time for 8 of the ripple peaks entering the tank to charge and spark, charge and spark.... and you can see very clearly the 8 sub-streamers in the psarks. Each of those substreamers is itself made up of substreamers generated at the coil's resonant frequency, far too fast for the camera to capture.
Wow, that "ring of fire" pic is fantastic!

TinselKoala

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Re: A Kapanadze generator replication - Febuary 2013
« Reply #125 on: March 19, 2013, 06:15:10 PM »
@Lakes: Thanks! That one is a time exposure, 15 seconds iirc, showing the corona from a simple corona motor made from a coathanger wire and an acorn nut for the center pivot.

@Farmhand:
Thanks for your interest, I hope my experiences might be helpful to you.

I use two cameras: the videos are taken with a Panasonic SDR-H40PC in full-auto mode and the stills are taken with a Canon 400D/Xti using the stock 18-55 mm lens in manual focus mode.

The stills in the slideshow above are frame-grabs from the Panasonic's video, full auto. It's dark night, the ambient light is from an LED flashlight aimed at the reflective roof of my observa-yurt and the rest of the light comes from the spark gap and the corona discharges.

The other stills from the Canon are either 1/15 sec, f/6.3, or long 15 or 30 seconds. ISO1600. I also used the LED flashlight for some fill lighting during the spark shots but almost all of the illumination comes from the primary spark gap and the corona itself.

I used a steady tripod and a remote shutter switch, and lately I've been shooting in multiple-shot mode, taking 10 or 12 frames in quick succession, 3 or 4 frames per second.

Processing includes cropping, noise reduction, contrast and saturation adjustment, sharpening slightly and resampling to smaller pixel count sizes using gimp.

The slide show was made from stills grabbed from a video, and assembled with YouTube's slideshow editor.

The videos are processed with OpenShot and WinFF.

Here is an older video showing TinselKoil 1, a completely solid-state Tesla Coil, no spark gap or tank capacitor bank, lighting an incandescent bulb with one wire, the other side of the bulb just connected to a bit of suspended aluminum foil as an "earth antenna". I've since modded this coil with a different resonator, lower aspect ratio (TinselKoil 2), but unfortunately I don't have it here at my present location to play with.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BMRJoqdy6E

So this showing the high voltage high frequency output "radiant", enabling the capacitative coupled, one-wire transmission of power, and the high-current output capability, making the filament glow brightly from Joule heating. This filament is actually broken, this bulb won't light from the AC mains!!

The driving electronics are very similar to some of the schemes I've seen detailed here. A 494 is used to generate the main clock pulses, which are split and inverted by some 2n7000 mini-mosfets; these signals are then fed to a current amplifier stage made of an H-bridge of complementary bipolar transistors; the outputs of this current amp drives two trifilar toroidal phase transformers, which then drive the power section H-bridge made from mosfets, which are switching rectified and filtered line current at about 170 VDC into the coil's primary. This one runs at around 830 kHz.... blanks out AM reception !!

I think if you have a lot of wire in your primary, lots of turns, you will actually interfere with the free ringing of the secondary, by mutual inductance effects. I think this is one reason that most Tesla-type coil arrangements are rather loosely coupled between primary and secondary. Another reason is to avoid arcing between the secondary and the upper turns of the primary, since a properly working coil will already have a great deal of voltage at the height of the primary upper turns.


ETA: A note on construction of these high-voltage air-core resonators: do NOT terminate or route your coil end wires inside the tube! If you do, even by making little holes just to secure the wire ends, you will be creating a relatively low-resistance pathway inside the coil form and the coil may spark preferentially inside and along the inner surface of the coil form. Also avoid using black PVC or black rubber parts, I think it's colored with carbon soot or something and is more conductive (at HV) than you would like.
How do I know these things? Miles of wasted wire and hours/days of wasted time, that's how.

Here's one corona psark I photographed last night. 1/15 sec, f/6.4, iso1600, the coil has a pointed breakout point magnetically attached to the doorknob on top of the toroid. Distance from top of the psark to the bottom breakout point is about 18-20 inches.

Farmhand

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Re: A Kapanadze generator replication - Febuary 2013
« Reply #126 on: March 19, 2013, 07:05:28 PM »
Thanks for the tips TinselKoala, I'm getting better with the camera, I use a tripod and the 2 second shutter delay so the camera has time to stop moving.
First I focus and click the shutter then turn on the coil. The photo below is 1/10 of a second, f 3.5 and ISO 1600. I think there is something to learn in looking at the effects
on film because a lot is missed by eye. The pretty stuff is a nice side effect of the research. The small coils i'm using to light the bulbs were never meant for HV or much current
I made them for 12 volt experiments, I am going to make another coil for HV but it'll be on a varnished wooden frame I hope.



Cheers

zcsaba77

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Re: A Kapanadze generator replication - Febuary 2013
« Reply #127 on: March 22, 2013, 09:48:42 PM »
Yes, 30 kV or perhaps a bit more when I up the input to the driver. You'll note that I have the flyback transformer totally immersed in oil for insulation and cooling.

That is not "cold fire"... far from it. There is so much power in that plasma that it actually burns the nitrogen in the air to nitrogen dioxide. Even a small JL will burn enough nitrogen to make a significant amount of NO2. This is one big advantage from using the ZVS driver: it is very efficient at transferring power into the load.

The plasma runs up the ladder because it is hot; convection currents in the surrounding air carry it upwards until the gap is so great that the plasma breaks up and stops the current.... then the voltage causes the arc to re-strike at the narrowest gap of the electrode set.

Hi Tinsel

Thank for information, but if you dont let escape plasma spark by example jar, will the plasma spark stay in the jar? and in vacuum spark is longer or shorter?

rgrds zcsaba77

TinselKoala

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Re: A Kapanadze generator replication - Febuary 2013
« Reply #128 on: March 23, 2013, 05:18:53 PM »
@Farmhand:
Nice shot of the spark, it seems that there are common features in these displays. Last night I saw a video of some small sparks, under 3 inches, but close-up... and they looked just like big sparks, with the lights off and no scale reference I couldn't tell much difference. The sparks are fractal structures, like watershed patterns of rivers but in 3 and 4 dimensions instead of 2, draining the "watershed" of space down into the source -- the Earth ground.

@zcsaba77:
Sure, you can contain the flyback plasma or spark in a sealed container. In fact, the arc burns nitrogen in the air down into nitrogen dioxide, NO2, which is a toxic yellowish gas that reacts with water to form nitric acid, so it's not good to be breathing this in any great quantity.
Vacuum.... there are vacuums, laboratory vacuums, and true hard vacuums. But there's really no such thing as a "real vacuum" that contains no ionizable gas molecules. Dry air at standard one atmosphere pressure can sustain 30 kV/cm between large spheres before breaking down. Point electrodes lower that considerably.... call it 10 kV/cm for "ordinary" small discharge electrodes. But when you start lowering the pressure the breakdown voltage goes down. This means longer sparks with decreasing pressure, up to a point. At some low pressure, easily obtainable with small vac pumps like air-conditioning service pumps or single-stage lab vac pumps, air becomes so conductive that you can't even build up enough voltage to "spark" at all -- the whole chamber with your low pressure air in it glows purple and shorts out your HV. To get down to the point where your "vacuum" is no longer conductive takes a much stronger vacuum pump, like a turbo or oil-diffusion pump, and is beyond my reach here in my home lab.

If you want to see some incredibly long, true sparks from HV current or static machines, try a chamber filled with Argon at 1 atm pressure. Other gases also make interesting displays with HV..... I came across this last night on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sYjGk2VqCA

guruji

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Re: A Kapanadze generator replication - Febuary 2013
« Reply #129 on: March 24, 2013, 09:15:56 AM »
Guys are you saying that the secret that TK says is the SG?

Earl

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Re: A Kapanadze generator replication - Febuary 2013
« Reply #130 on: March 26, 2013, 07:38:17 AM »
@ TIKA

thanks for the link with Fabrice Andre's lab notes.  Unfortunately no matter how I try to download this file, it always stops at 27%.

Would you be able to upload this file to another site, such as MediaFire ?

Regards, Earl

Grumage

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Re: A Kapanadze generator replication - Febuary 2013
« Reply #131 on: March 27, 2013, 07:45:40 PM »
Hello Tika and all.

I have been "busting my wotsits off" trying to get even a glimmer from my set up, to no avail. In absolute frustration I have put it to one side, as sometimes a break can help!
Zeitmaschine posted a really interesting Russian patent a few pages ago on the main thread, which due to really heavy snow keeping me indoors, I decided to have a look at.
http://bd.patent.su/2386000-2386999/pat/servl/servlet92b8.html
The mathematics that I can understand seems to make sense. But it is the practical side that has got me stumpped. Thyristors that are inversely connected need  a different polarity on the gate for triggering. But connecting coils just turns them on. I found that I could connect a pair via a N/O reed switch then trigger with a coil. But how to alternate?

If you read the patent carefully you can see it should work for both Capacitive as per drawing or Inductive, no drawing, and it got me thinking. Could it be the inductive version that is being used on the TK device? Theoretically the resonant circuit should keep adding energy on each pulse and maybe the Spark Gap is the overflow not the instigator???

What do you all think?
@ Earl, I have a copy backed up, could email if you wish?

Cheers to all, Grum.

Earl

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Re: A Kapanadze generator replication - Febuary 2013
« Reply #132 on: March 29, 2013, 04:13:21 PM »
@ Grum

thanks for the offer - in the meantime I found it at another source.

Regards, Earl

mflynn44

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Re: A Kapanadze generator replication - Febuary 2013
« Reply #133 on: April 02, 2013, 02:20:38 AM »
 Tika,
This thread is “A Kapanadze Generator Replication” by Tika. I have FE projects I’m interested in and my own theories about how these devices might work, and they do have a relation to the Kapanadze generator, but I’m not going to post on this thread. It seems the thread has quickly become too involved with other people’s theories and other people’s builds.
 Tika, I have bought the Russian ferrite rings, the AD9850 DDS, and the OPA4350UA. Since some of these parts have to do with the front end are we going to use, in addition, a microwave transformer, a diode string, a microwave capacitor, and a spark gap?  I’d like to start on your build. Can you post your circuit for the DDS and the OPA4350? I bought 12 of the ferrite rings; how many are actually required?
 I think a working Kapanadze generator is possible and has been accomplished by a few people. The problem is there is no good documentation or way for another person to duplicate the work. You all know it’s just mass confusion and chaos in the FE field but we could change that here by concentrating on Tika’s build and documenting everything open source. JMHO, thank you.

tru168

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Re: A Kapanadze generator replication - Febuary 2013
« Reply #134 on: April 07, 2013, 05:57:59 AM »
Hi all Kapanadze device experimenters,


 Just wish to share my opinion on kapanadze's coil design and also Naudin's solidstate version.


The coil must be resonate at certain frequency just like normal tesla coil secondary do. In tesla coil, a metal ball on top of secondary forms a capacitor into air. Secondary coil series with the said capacitor forms a Lc Resonance circuit.


 Original Kapanadze use earth to act as a huge capacitor, and react with secondary coil to form a LC resonance circuit.


   Most of LC circuit need to have as highest Q factor as possible to peak its output and also efficiency.
Most of replicators coil seems winding primary and secondary close tight  together, which kill the coil's Q factor., and weaken its efficiency. Look at some of Kapanadze's primary, with plastic bar spacer ( glass rod will give highest Q)  to form a frame to hold the 6 turns pf primary coil, and also using thick copper and copper tubing will be highest Q factor.


As for Naudin's design, the 50Hz modulator won't work. (  In fact, adding more coils on the design kills its Q factor. )  the reason i said it worn't work because , the modulation coil winding will act as a secondary and pick up voltages from primary, and this high frequency pulse output will kill the two driver transistors. If using high voltage transistors to prevent it from damage , the modulator will not modulating the coil,  because the coil will have higher power output ( if the design really OU) than the modulation circuit. You need [size=78%]real higher power to mobulate the coil and modulator circuit will draw a lot of current , the whole system will not operate at OU. [/size]


 Just my 2 cents worth of opinion.




Regards,
Tru168