styropyro

what happens when you light a tesla coil on fire??

Added 2021-02-14 20:27:26 +0000 UTC

I've been wanting to explore more of the electrical properties of fire for quite some time, and have recently started building a multi-kW solid state tesla coil to investigate this. I have a lot of experiments I would like to try, but obviously I'll be focusing on the coolest ones when I finish the video.

Using a tesla coil to power a burning topload (or even a purely fire topload) is nearly impossible for all but a few tesla coil designs. Anything that's dual resonant like modern high performance solid state coils or even classic vacuum tube coils will get knocked out of tune by the chaotic capacitance of a flame. This means I'm limited to tesla coil designs that are only singly resonant.

I've settled with the PLL (phase locked loop) topology as it is self tuning and hopefully very adaptive to a chaotic topload. I'm new to the solid state scene but this may end up being one of the largest tesla coils ever built with this design. If all goes well I'll be able to audio modulate it, and possibly use it to build an awesome tesla powered flame speaker!! Stay tuned for updates!