On Wed, 9 May 2007, leaking pen wrote: > in addition, it would only throw the long sparks in the direction of > the motion of the seeds, yes no?
The direction of such a "spark" is an interesting issue. Would RB sparks tend to curve, to follow the e-field flux lines of the electrode supplying the high voltage? Normal sparks tend to mostly ignore the e-field direction and instead wander around, creating fractal jaggedness. Since the spark-plasma is a conductor, the growing spark is akin to a "metal tree" having branch tips which grow longer as various EM pulses race back and forth along the branches. Well, sparks grow like that unless the field gradient is extremely high. If the RB spark is growing at close to the speed of light, then it shouldn't behave like a conductive object. It would outrace its surrounding e-field. Or maybe the e-field would be like a shock wave that affects the electrons even as they create it? But instead if there were considerable time delays introduced by the avalanching process, something like "stepped leader" pulses, then the tip of such a spark could grow much slower than C, giving any e-fields near the tip some time to spread forward and guide the discharge direction, even though the individual electrons might move at nearly C. On other things: suppose a very simple "particle accelerator" is attached to the top of a Tesla coil, consisting of a long vacuum tube with a single electrode at one end. If the Tesla coil's instantaneous output waveform then rises to many MV before any electrons finally spew out of that electrode, then the fields inside the vacuum tube might be in the MV range (since they'd not have been shorted out by electron currents within the vacuum.) Those first electrons might experience many MV of acceleration while flying to the end of the glass tube. Lots of them might make it entirely through the glass, and then trigger a "runaway breakdown" spark in the weaker fields in the air outside. I say this because Tesla's patents show just such a device, and if Tesla ever achieved miles-long power transmission as the stories say, I speculate that the device in the patent drawing accidentally harnessed "Runaway Breakdown" physics. It would explain a lot of those weird Tesla stories. Check out figure 4 in this Tesla patent drawing: Tesla patent 685957 http://amasci.com/tesla/tes_radpat2.gif I suspect that the long vacuum tube in figure 4 above might be a "seed generator" for producing MeV electrons. Of course it could only do so if it was connected to the top of a many-tens-of-MV Tesla coil. That part isn't shown in the drawing. Here's another weird thing: other Tesla transmitter patents show two metal terminals, a second one suspended alone on insulators, with sparks jumping from the main TC terminal to the suspended terminal. For drift-tube drive, this makes sense! To guarantee that the initial e-fields inside a vacuum tube are extremely intense, we might want to connect the vacuum tube to a second metal sphere held next to the Tesla coil's main sphere. That way the Tesla coil could build up a very high voltage over many milliseconds before finally sparking across to the second metal sphere. The second sphere would see a sudden rise of high voltage over nanoseconds. Without this fast "kick," the voltage drop inside the vacuum tube might never rise very high, so it might not produce the fast "seed" electrons needed to create miles-long Blue Jet discharges. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact! - Mark Twain (((((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (O) ) ) ) ) ))))))))))))))))))) William J. Beaty http://staff.washington.edu/wbeaty/ beaty chem.washington.edu Research Engineer billb eskimo.com UW Chem Dept, Bagley Hall RM74 206-543-6195 Box 351700, Seattle, WA 98195-1700
