Painfully Amazing Stuff

[alan sailer]

I work at a R&D facility that does a lot of neat stuff. They are decommissioning a 400MeV proton implanter. I'm not busy so I asked to help. The thing is major 60's technology. Today I took out the primary AC supply that outputs ~50KV to a
voltage multiplier that gets it up to 400keV. The entire high vacuum/high voltage assembly is inside a grounded room.
No electrical power goes into this room, all the power is supplied by a six foot long insulated drive shaft that powers a generator inside the box. The box itself is set on four HV insulators. All the controls running into the insulated box are six foot long rods of plastic. It's all a wonderful time machine. The inverter that drives the 50KVAC power supply is all BJT.

The painful part is it will all be scrapped.

Some snapshots.

[55#sofcopper]

That is awesome. You don't have the opportunity to try to buy the equipment.  That would be fun to experiment with. I guess it would be hard to do anything with it in a residential setting. Thanks for sharing.

[klugesmith]

Ooh! Aah!   Thanks for sharing. Hope you get to help with the scrapping.

Your last picture, perhaps a voltage multiplier inside a stack of toroidal electrodes, looks like a thing I got in mostly cannibalized form at the flea market a few years back.  A few HV diodes and capacitors were left.

Regarding the high voltage shack where power comes in by long, insulating, rotating drive shaft.
12 years ago, someone posted a similar story and pictures after visiting Fermilab.   
https://fusor.net/board/viewtopic.php?p=31153#p31153
Anybody know if control and telemetry are managed by fiber optic cable, in recently designed installations?

Scroll up in that thread for my own feeble demonstration of the same principle.