Post-Soviet Tesla Coil Teardown and Test

[Mads Barnkob]

Tesla Coil Teardown and test of a Post-Soviet era Tesla coil. Hardware and circuit analysis with a spark throwing test.

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This Tesla coil teardown revealed a pretty solid build, but with a few bad design decisions. The topload is made from a helical coil of aluminium tubing, wrapped around two discs, to become a vertically wound tube ring toroid. The secondary coil seems to have around 1000 turns and only a few layers of thin varnish. The primary coil is a soft wire put inside a rubber tubing, for insulation.

 

The bridge uses a full bridge of IGBTs IRGP50B60PDP which are rated for 600 V and Ic 33 A.



The driver uses a potentiometer variable frequency start-up oscillator and a primary feedback current transformer takes over, once the best setting has been found. The ICs have had their markings sanded off, to protect the obvious simple SSTC circuit that consists of a oscillator, a few logic ICs TL or CMOS and two gate drive ICs.



Sparks

[LoOdaK]

Great video Mads, the first SSTC I'm building right now has similar dimensions. As it looks from the video, the secondary tube seems to be around 100mm in diameter, mine is 75mm. When I saw the video I thought "well my SSTC is going to be a little bit bigger than I expected" 

Also, those sparks are pretty big.

[Mads Barnkob]

Great video Mads, the first SSTC I'm building right now has similar dimensions. As it looks from the video, the secondary tube seems to be around 100mm in diameter, mine is 75mm. When I saw the video I thought "well my SSTC is going to be a little bit bigger than I expected" 

Also, those sparks are pretty big.

Everything I ever made, turned out bigger than initial planned

This does produce a good spark length for a full-bridge SSTC, but it is also rather large for the power consumption.