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Sparks Gallery Page 2

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Tesla coil, Van de Graff Generator, Static elctricity, Arc, Arcs, Arcing, & Sparks. High Voltage!!!

When the grounded discharge wand is brought near the collector dome, lightning discharges will occur, accompanied by a crackling sound. Try varying the distance between the wand and the collector to see the different types of sparks the generator can produce. Some are white-hot and quite intense, others are a red-purple and less intense. Try to see how long you can get the white-hot sparks to jump. Under the best circumstances, sparks can leap up to fifteen inches. I believe the rule is three inches for every 100,000 volts.

The objective of a Tesla Coil is to take electrical energy from a 230 Volt 50 Hertz mains supply and increase it to a minimum of 200kV, the voltage needed for making large electrical sparks. Doing this directly at 50 Hertz would be impractical, as it would call for a very heavy and expensive iron core transformer. Furthermore, such an arrangement would be extremely dangerous. To get around this problem, the 230V 50-Hertz from the mains is first stepped up to 10kV and then converted to RF energy in an air core transformer using a capacitor and spark gap arrangement. A straightforward RF transformer with appropriate turns ratio would work, but not very efficiently. However, by tuning the air-core transformer to an RF frequency with appropriate capacitors, the Tesla Coil becomes a very efficient spark generating system. In fact the Tesla Coil is a tuned air-core RF transformer.