Low Power, Table Top, DC Tesla Coil.

 

I have been researching Tesla Coils and attempting to decide what typology I should design, and I discovered that a DC powered Tesla coil typology exist, which is not solid-state.

Thanks to Steve Conner’s explanation of the evolution of the OLTC @ http://www.scopeboy.com/tesla/oltcfaq10.html

Because I was hoping to first design a very low power Tesla Coil, and I already had a 20kV DC power supply I thought this DC typology might be good introduction. The20kV power supply is from a negative-ion generator and is only 100uA, so the output power is in only 2 watts. Which is err… really low for a Tesla Coil. But a large part of this project was attempting to get acquainted with the process of designing a Tesla Coil and the processes and tools used. I liked the idea of doing a DC Tesla Coil because there are not many detailed examples online; which offered me a chance to both design something unique, and be forced to learn a lot on my own.

I wound a small Tesla Coil secondary, and used Bart Anderson’s JavaScript Tesla Coil calculation program:  JavaTC to help figure out a good primary coil set up. @ http://www.classictesla.com/java/javatc/javatc.html

This program is very helpful if you don’t already have a solid design in mind and want to try different designs which might work with the parts you have.

This was supposed to be a weekend project, but it really falls more into the “very extended” weekend category (+60 hours). I initially thought I had capacitors which could work for the project, but ended up needing to build them which took a fair bit of time.

…results & more to come soon. (11/24/2017)

(11/25/2017) Some preliminary results!!