Quest for Fire (or Radiant Spike)

[Ernst]

I think that distributed capacitance is a source of much confusion. It certainly does not affect the Q as you already mentioned.
Tesla did a lot of research trying to minimize the distributed capacitance but at one point he suddenly stops trying, without stating a reason and without a solution.
I think your thinking is still too much inside the box .
A coil has an inductance, a resistance and a capacitance.
The inductance is the coil's resistance to changes in current through the coil.
The resistance is the coil's resistance to current through the coil (obviously).
The capacitance is the charge needed to create a voltage difference across the coil (exactly like a capacitor, actually).
You can take a coil and let it resonate on its own inductance and capacitance, so without top-load.
I think that the coil's total capacitance is partly made up of this distributed capacitance and partly of the coil's geometry (viewing the coil simply as a conducting cylinder).
It has experimentally been shown that a coil's self-resonance frequency can be calculated solely using the length/diameter ratio and the wire length. That means that the coil's capacitance and inductance (or rather the product of these) are determined by those values alone.
That again, means that by increasing the coil's (distributed) capacitance you decrease its inductance.
I think that the spike you are looking for is the voltage spike created by breaking the current through an inductor. For that you will need a large inductance and capacitance is irrelevant. Just connect it to a 12V battery, wait for some current to flow, and disconnect. You will get your spike. I did this with the HV coil of a distribution transformer (about 4500 H, that is Henries, not mH!) and got some unpleasant shocks.

Does that help? (no, I'm not referring to those shocks )

Ernst.

[OrionLightShip]

The McCullough generator is (According to Gerard Morin) supposed to be something special and does something that other generators he has tried do not do. Having taken one apart, I can tell you that the generating coils on that particular machine are wound of flat copper braid about 1/2 inch wide or more. Just throwing that out there. Not saying it means a thing.

Dave

That generator is an oddball thing all right.

[Turion]

A thought

The McCullough generator is (According to Gerard Morin) supposed to be something special and does something that other generators he has tried do not do. Having taken one apart, I can tell you that the generating coils on that particular machine are wound of flat copper braid about 1/2 inch wide or more. Just throwing that out there. Not saying it means a thing.

Dave

[OrionLightShip]

What if you made a coil from very wide copper foil as is shown in this video (start at 4:40). There would be a huge increase in the capacitance which, upon turn off would lend itself to create a very powerful inductive spike.

I don't know what we are supposed to find under the curve of that spike except for current but plenty of people think there is more, so why not make it as large as possible?

Now what if, like in the video I posted, you were to use concentric coils. Let's say you have two concentric coils. The primary is fired (charged) and the secondary coil has a diode so no current flows. Just like a flyback convertor. Now the primary circuit is opened and the field collapses creating current flow in the secondary and also the spike which can be fed into the secondary coii as well.

Perhaps this is just nonsense but it seems to me that you could use the primary in attraction mode and the secondary in repulsion mode. I simply don't have the bench experience to know these things; I have thoughts that create questions that I then try to answer.

[OrionLightShip]

I've got a couple of ideas and questions but first let's get two things straight. The first is that I don't have much experience with pulse motor/generators. Magnetics is not my thing. The second is that I don't think like most people. I try to keep my thinking out of the box so my ideas are not overly contaminated with "what is known". So most of the time, my ideas are simply way out there and wrong as well. My hope is that at the very least someone will be entertained and at best; my crazy idea will grow into something better in someone else's mind.

In "normal" resonance; we look at a circuit lke a Tesla coil for simplicity of explanation. The current flows into the coil creating a magnetic field which on collapsing becomes the current source to the capacitor (top terminal). The voltage on the capacitor builds to maximum as the magnetic field collapses into the coil. Now the capacitor is the voltage source to the coil. Back and forth they go.

It is said that the distributed capacitance should be minimized because it kills the Q of the circuit. That brings me to the question, how can distributed capacitance affect the Q when the Q is represented as L/R. Where is C in that equation?

Why not maximise the distributed capacitance? Did not Tesla say that it was useful and did he not in his later experiments use the planar bifilar coil he made famous? Did he not talk about the increased capacity of that coil?