Quote:
Originally Posted by stevend
And what you said above about Aaron reminds me of back when I used to do high voltage propulsion experiments. I'd always be on the look out for purple corona jets anywhere being the cause of the propulsion since I was looking for something more exotic. Once I found corona coming out of a section of thickly insulated wire, right through the rubber. If the voltage is high enough and/or the electric field is asymetric enough and there are tiny but not noticable holes then corona will go right through. Maybe Ghst's jar has some tiny tiny holes there through which some of the ionized air escapes unnoticed. Then when the radiant event happens, it just follows this ionized air out, like any other conductive path. Might be interesting if it's repeatable, to put a few layers of tape over the outside of the jar where it happens and see if it still happens. Just a guess based on experience.
-Steve
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I tend to agree about the tiny holes. When I was doing some motor tests with a car battery in series with my circuit, I noticed that one of the battery cable handles was also shooting a long skinny plasma spark. I trimed the cheap plastic off the handle and saw that the metal had rusted around the wire, and a small hole had rusted clear through at the end of the wire. The spark from my circuit was jumping across this hole, but no longer shooting outwards. So there must have also been a hole in the plastic. Now that Ghst has posted his effect, I'm wondering what role the curvature radius of the outer dielectric surface has.
I've made some new gradient plates which only have a single sheet of foil sandwiched between dielectric layers of varying thickness, and one which is nothing but dielectric with a hole in it. But I'm not going to post any pictures until I can resolve the camera 'burn' effect. I've mentioned before that the camera doesn't see the same thing I see. Now I've found out that even IR diodes produce the bright white burn in the image:
CCTV Busting Infra-Red Headset Makes You Invisible | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
Here's an example from my workbench:
By
inertiatek at 2009-03-30