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: Hi, I am a 4th year electrical engineering student and I am about to start
: my senior design project which is to build a low power Tesla Coil using
: modern RF electronic techniques to attempt to improve the overall
: performance of the Tesla Coil and modulate the input to the coil with an
: electronic instrument to use the plasma as a speaker. I am finding alot of
: good resources online concerning high power tesla coils but unfortunately
: my design has to be 10 Watts or less. I was wondering if someone could
: give me a push in the right direction as to where to start with such a low
: power design.
:
Since you'll be using it as a plasma speaker, you'll likely want to use a DC powered CW RF oscillator and scaled down primary and secondary. Although a classical Tesla Coil would use a primary and secondary circuit that is tuned to oscillate at the same frequency, you could use a higher primary:secondary coupling and drive the secondary as a HV stepup transformer or even a flyback transformer. By using a sharp pointed electrode at the top of the winding, you should be able to establish a corona (plasma) discharge with only a few thousand volts of output. Or, you might simply draw an arc across the secondary coil instead of using corona.
There are a variety of approaches that can be taken for the RF oscillator. Here are some examples that you can look at for ideas:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Build_A_Plasma_Speaker/
http://4hv.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?69870.post
http://94.100.113.48/475100001-475150000/475118301-475118400/475118352_5_Gkl6.jpeg
http://scopeboy.com/tesla/tl494-fullbridge.gif and
http://scopeboy.com/tesla/tl494-audio-fullbridge.gif
http://scopeboy.com/tesla/flyback.html
http://4hv.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?60025.post and
http://www.volny.cz/jmartis/singing_arc_fm.png
Good luck on your studies and your project!
Bert
Message Thread Low Power Soild State Tesla Coil - Joel 10/4/2009, 5:39 pm
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