... If high voltage and vacuum experiments in general are not against the rules in this forum, it would be a pleasure for me to show some of the stuff
Best regards
kilovolt
Here is a
link to the forum Terms and Rules, which can also be found at the bottom of each page. I don't think anything is forbidden when discussing high voltage and vacuum experiments as long as all parties to the discussion are knowledgeable and competent in those areas, as obviously you are and I believe I am. We do try to discourage the incompetent from messing with stuff that can harm them or others.
I am no "expert" in anything. I have worked in electronics since the 1950s, first as a newbie experimenter, later as a trained technician, and still later as an electrical engineer. Most of my work has been interdisciplinary in nature, and all of it has been with national defense contractors. My electrical engineering degree is a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering, awarded by the University of Dayton School of Engineering in 1978. So it has been awhile since I worked in the halls of academia. My career as a particle accelerator engineer began in 1996 when I replaced a real physicist who wanted to work for Argonne National Laboratories, where they have some really BIG accelerators. All I knew when I applied for the job was what I had learned from reading text books. I had no hands-on experience with any accelerators whatsoever. Fortunately, I am fairly intelligent and a quick learner. It was a real "character building experience" learning how to keep the beast operational. But it was also a lot of fun and I learned a lot about accelerators.
I have never attempted to build a Tesla Coil, and haven't visited any of their web rings for quite some time. As a kid, I played around with a genuine Ford ignition coil packaged in a wooden box with adjustable interrupter contacts. And I toyed with the idea of building one using plans in Alfred P. Morgan's seminal text for young boys, "The Boy Electrician". But vacuum tubes and electronics came along and distracted me for the next sixty-something years. But I never lost my passion for things high voltage. I "borrowed" an electrostaic generator from the electrical engineering lab while I was an undergraduate student, intending to restore it to operation. My professors wondered why I was "wasting my time" since there was no practical use for such a device, but I was allowed to take it home. This was a
Voss machine, not a dual counter-rotating disk Wimshurst machine. I wanted to replace the brush electrodes with an ion source salvaged from home smoke detectors, thus eliminating a source of friction.
Cockroft-Walton multipliers are another thing I like to "play" with. The particle accelerator I maintained used one to create 1.7 MV terminal potential. Most laboratory high voltage power supplies also use this circuit for voltages up to 100 kV or so, limited mostly by breakdown in air. For really high voltages, a form of Van de Graaff generator using a chain of insulated metal pellets is used. This accelerator is called a pelletron and is custom-made by National Electrostatic Corporation for customers all over the world. I got to see (and walk inside of, after they pumped out the sulfur hexafluoride insulating gas) one at the Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This was a tandem machine (negative ions in, positive ions out) capable of 25 MV terminal potential. At that level of acceleration, virtually all the electrons of the accelerated negative ions are subsequently "stripped" off before passing through (and accelerated again by) the high-energy column. These positive ions gain additional energy proportional to their positive charge, so (for example) a 25 MeV ion with a +10 charge gains an additional 250 MeV energy, leaving the accelerator with 275 MeV energy. Compare this with my "toy" accelerator that on a very good day can produce ions with only a +4 charge. Some users of the Tandetron accelerator (the model I used) retrofitted their machines with pelletron chains, and some replaced the Cockroft-Walton vacuum tube oscillator exciter with a solid-state oscillator, as was done at the Michigan Ion Beam Laboratory in Ann Arbor. They also equipped their machine with a TORVIS negative hydrogen ion source (designed and built by NEC) to perform simulated solar wind experiments on hardened electronics used in outer space.
So, my professors in the 1960s and 1970s were wrong. There are many practical applications for electrostatic generators, they just didn't know about them yet.
