Post by Empress Palpatine on Feb 25, 2010 23:43:51 GMT -6
I have just had my Tesla coil samadhi! For quite sometime now I have been looking for readable information on how a Tesla coil works. It has always been a bit of a mystery, and I only had a partial understanding at best. Trying to get explanations from those who build them is like trying to enter a secret society. Ask a question and they answer in electricianese. My reasons were, as you would probably guess, Force inspired. I have been digging into the secrets of Sith lightning for quite some time. I have found most Tesla coil builders to be very smart people but also complete muggles. At least that has been my experience so far. From them, I get the technical part. The esoteric I come up with on my own.
I started to get better clues after searching various Tesla and Tesla coil sites.
I was led here:
www.richieburnett.co.uk/tesla.shtml
www.richieburnett.co.uk/parts.html
www.richieburnett.co.uk/operation.html#operation
This was helpful in part, but still a bit too much electricianese. I again went on a hunt of my own and finally got lucky. I found a moving diagram that really shows the flow of all that is happening. If you have Java, you can see this for yourself:
www.falstad.com/circuit/e-tesla.html
I looked at this moving diagram and the former ones. A general picture was beginning to emerge. I was still uncertain concerning my guesses as to what was doing what on the moving diagram. I felt I needed to confirm it and ask a few more questions, so I went to a person at this particular site to ask a few questions.
Here is the story more or less: To the far left hand side of the moving diagram is the source of the juice, an ordinary wall outlet. Wall outlets have 60 hertz alternating current. The changing back and forth that you see happening is the alternating current. This whole thing is slowed way down so one can even perceive what happens. Normally the alternations are sixty times a second. The first pair of curls (coils) is a transformer. Transformers change the voltage to make it more suitable for the purpose. This would be likely box-shaped and in the guts of the Tesla coil bottom. The juice is changed, and it collects where you see that steadily increasing number next to the two parallel lines which represents a capacitor. A capacitor is like a container that slowly fills up. The capacitor will gather and hold this energy until that number reaches 10 kilavolts. At that point it is full of this energy (much voltage) until it can be held no longer because it then escapes across the spark gap in a frenzied leap of arcs (the place where the two arrows are pointing towards each other.) The spark gap is two electrodes pointed at each other with a little space of air between. The air normally discourages juice from jumping over, but if the juice has piled up too much like water behind a dam, the air no longer stops it; but it conducts it across allowing a giant flaming river. You have to sit and watch and wait for this to occur (in real life it happens a couple of hundred times a second.) Notice it will do the same thing when the current shifts direction and the numbers are negative. The frenzied leaping happens back and forth many times until it slowly settles. That is an oscillation. Then the two coils on the right come to life starting with the one on the left as the frenzy races through back and forth. The second one picks up the energies of the first, and it now starts its oscillation. These two coils are not actually touching each other. They are just near each other.The first coil is the primary and normally that is the big fat copper wire you see on the bottom below a big tower with the much thinner wire wound around it which is the secondary (second coil to the right on the diagram). The secondary (second coil) has to be made to just the right specifications in order to pick up that oscillation and be therefore resonant with it. Here is where the Tesla coil maker's skill is important. All parts much match perfectly. The do-nut shaped head or torus so commonly seen on top of those things is represented by the two horizontal parallel lines on the right side of the diagram. It is a capacitor also and it gathers energy until it releases out as the sparks/lightning. They show that by the line leading to the ground. The ground itself plays an important role because energy comes and goes out of the ground as well. The ground gives it strength. Now when you watch one of those things putting on its fantastic display you can know what is going on inside it.
Now you can speculate: When Palpatine used his Sith lightning, what was going on inside of him?
I started to get better clues after searching various Tesla and Tesla coil sites.
I was led here:
www.richieburnett.co.uk/tesla.shtml
www.richieburnett.co.uk/parts.html
www.richieburnett.co.uk/operation.html#operation
This was helpful in part, but still a bit too much electricianese. I again went on a hunt of my own and finally got lucky. I found a moving diagram that really shows the flow of all that is happening. If you have Java, you can see this for yourself:
www.falstad.com/circuit/e-tesla.html
I looked at this moving diagram and the former ones. A general picture was beginning to emerge. I was still uncertain concerning my guesses as to what was doing what on the moving diagram. I felt I needed to confirm it and ask a few more questions, so I went to a person at this particular site to ask a few questions.
Here is the story more or less: To the far left hand side of the moving diagram is the source of the juice, an ordinary wall outlet. Wall outlets have 60 hertz alternating current. The changing back and forth that you see happening is the alternating current. This whole thing is slowed way down so one can even perceive what happens. Normally the alternations are sixty times a second. The first pair of curls (coils) is a transformer. Transformers change the voltage to make it more suitable for the purpose. This would be likely box-shaped and in the guts of the Tesla coil bottom. The juice is changed, and it collects where you see that steadily increasing number next to the two parallel lines which represents a capacitor. A capacitor is like a container that slowly fills up. The capacitor will gather and hold this energy until that number reaches 10 kilavolts. At that point it is full of this energy (much voltage) until it can be held no longer because it then escapes across the spark gap in a frenzied leap of arcs (the place where the two arrows are pointing towards each other.) The spark gap is two electrodes pointed at each other with a little space of air between. The air normally discourages juice from jumping over, but if the juice has piled up too much like water behind a dam, the air no longer stops it; but it conducts it across allowing a giant flaming river. You have to sit and watch and wait for this to occur (in real life it happens a couple of hundred times a second.) Notice it will do the same thing when the current shifts direction and the numbers are negative. The frenzied leaping happens back and forth many times until it slowly settles. That is an oscillation. Then the two coils on the right come to life starting with the one on the left as the frenzy races through back and forth. The second one picks up the energies of the first, and it now starts its oscillation. These two coils are not actually touching each other. They are just near each other.The first coil is the primary and normally that is the big fat copper wire you see on the bottom below a big tower with the much thinner wire wound around it which is the secondary (second coil to the right on the diagram). The secondary (second coil) has to be made to just the right specifications in order to pick up that oscillation and be therefore resonant with it. Here is where the Tesla coil maker's skill is important. All parts much match perfectly. The do-nut shaped head or torus so commonly seen on top of those things is represented by the two horizontal parallel lines on the right side of the diagram. It is a capacitor also and it gathers energy until it releases out as the sparks/lightning. They show that by the line leading to the ground. The ground itself plays an important role because energy comes and goes out of the ground as well. The ground gives it strength. Now when you watch one of those things putting on its fantastic display you can know what is going on inside it.
Now you can speculate: When Palpatine used his Sith lightning, what was going on inside of him?
