Green Smoke

[alan sailer]

I never sure where to post this stuff because its mostly about the plasma. The driver is a vintage TV flyback transformer so...

I got a beautiful plasma tube from Aaron Ristau that has a very rare green smoke look. I have tried many times to get this effect and have totally failed. Aaron is better at this than I am.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/8763834@N02/52903160342/in/dateposted/

The basic formula is oxygen/nitrogen with a lot of xenon. Aaron also uses neon which does puzzle me. The green color is from an excited oxygen state bound to xenon.* The frequency is about 100kHz. The higher the frequency the better the smoke.

The video is shot at 2X speed so the smoke is even more elegant. But real life is even better.

Cheers.

* Carl Willis has claimed this and has quoted an older paper that he used for supporting evidence. He also measured the spectral lines and showed correspondence to this theory. A similar effect causes the green auroras...

[Patrick]

I think you should use the term "plasma" not smoke. But this is stunning if you can duplicate this and post your results back here that would be much appreciated by many of us !

[Mads Barnkob]

I got a similar green glow effect when using a regular 125 mm light bulb as a plasma globe. I am not sure what kind of gas filling it has, but any standard light bulb mix for sure.



It is not that easy to make out in the video, but in person the green glow is very apparent and can be seen in long exposure pictures.

High voltage supply is a monitor flyback driven by a TL494 driver running at halfbridge of IRFP250N MOSFETs at 30VDC.

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[davekni]

It is not that easy to make out in the video, but in person the green glow is very apparent and can be seen in long exposure pictures.

Great still pictures!  Would be fascinating to learn what is causing the green glow.  I wonder if green comes from some energy level transition with a longer time constant.  That could be a reason the green appears spread throughout the bulb rather than concentrated at high current regions.

[johnf]

Most incandescent bulbs use a little argon to help stop evaporating the tungsten filament

Has anybody tried this with multi-halide arc lamps??