The most powerful Russian Tesla coil in Europe (and maybe in the world)

[TeslaFX_rus]

Hello everyone from Russia. Today I will show a unique design that has no analogues in the world (as far as I know)

Electrical specs:

Quad full dridge fz600r17ke3
MMC ~1uF 40 Kv (set of Russian and French capacitors)
Primary current: 3200A (50% duty cycle 5ms\5ms) max, and ordinary DR mode 1\10 6500A
Primary turns: 3 1 inch copper tube
Power supply 380v 3 phase 600A maximum registered current
DC bus capacitor 30000 uF
Driver developed by our team on FPGA
Lightning reaches about 11 m

Physical specs:
Total installation height: 6.2m (7m from terminal to ground)
Top toroid diameter: 3.2m
Secondary coil: 0.5x2.7m
Liquid cooling of the primary winding with transformer oil

Our team visited video blogger Dmitry from the DP labs channel and together we decided to conduct the first fully functional test of the Tesla coil at full power. If someone does not understand Russian, but I can briefly explain what they say there: on the first day, the wires in the local electrical panel (25mm2) melted and we replaced them with 35mm2. We had aluminum feed wires with a cross section of 95 mm2 for each phase. There was a very large voltage drop. The electric panel reached 50v less than it should have, and the coil reached 100v less. Therefore, we decided to connect the same cable in parallel, but we did not have enough length, and we had to weld it.
The most important task in this event was to identify the weak points of this installation. Weak spots have been found, and now we are making these nodes more powerful.

If the people of this forum show interest in this design, I can post more detailed photos.
Soon Dmitry should have a new video on his channel, where we turn on the coil at full power and give it even more hellish modes of operation




P.S. Forum, stop calling me a Russian spam bot, I'm not a Russian spam bot 

[Mathieu thm]

wow I'm impressed with the size and specs of this tesla coil, the results are impressive, well done!

[AstRii]

Holy crap! What is the resonant frequency of this monster?

[TeslaFX_rus]

Holy crap! What is the resonant frequency of this monster?

45kHz

[AstRii]

That's actually quite high, the secondary must be wound with soo thick wire.

[Mads Barnkob]

Very impressive spark machine!

How is the quad full-bridge constructed to the primary coil? All just in parallel? Transformer coupled? Split MMC coupled?

I assume you are showing the 50/50% duty cycle sparks at the end of the video, you are SERIOUSLY SETTING AIR ON FIRE! That is plasma floating in the air after the arc is extinguished! I only saw this on high speed recordings of sparks, not in real life speed

I think the worlds largest is still Greg Leyh from Light on Demand www.lod.org has his modular/mobile 12 meter tall DRSSTC: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bellmine/sets/72157706088757021/ and ArcAttack with their Project Titan at 6 meter https://arcattack.com/about-us/special-projects/project-titan/ and Gigantor from Steve Ward/Jeff Larson/Terry Blake was properly around 6 meter too: https://www.flickr.com/photos/38438611@N02/sets/72157627420521564/

The russian bot thing is not just to make fun of russia. I seriously have to delete 1-2 russian spam accounts per day, I guess I have deleted over 1000 accounts, all from russian IP adresses and with spam in russian. It only got worse after russia invaded Ukraine with war.

[TeslaFX_rus]

Transistors are connected in parallel, the most successful arrangement in our opinion.
Here are some photos of the power plant:



The dimensions are impressive.  But we are not so far and have gone along the length of the lightning.  In the usual dr-mode, we plan to raise the current to 10 kA, but we see no practical sense in this.  We rely on thick zippers.  Now we are correcting weak points in the coil, and we plan to break the record.  But unfortunately in Russia it is very difficult to do this, eBay does not work, suppliers of power electronic components refuse to work in our country.  Space prices for spare parts.  In a word, we are trying to squeeze the maximum out of what we have.  and finding a space with a good power supply for such a launch is an almost impossible task.

[Mads Barnkob]

Transistors are connected in parallel, the most successful arrangement in our opinion.
Here are some photos of the power plant:

What a power house of an inverter! Did you put any ways of measuring heat under IGBTs? To see if there is differences from outer to inner IGBT.

That is a very compact bridge design, love the snubber capacitor placement and the busbar work is very nice. Are those electrolytic capacitor banks from something 3-phased? Looks like those laminated busbars have some stickers like its industrial modules?

Going bigger is properly going to raise questions, if 3x400V is the way to go, maybe have to look for 3x690V, but I guess its rare to find. Using 10kV on the supply is properly too much of a space-cost-approach

[davekni]

Impressive coil!  Based on specs and performance, I'm guessing the controller is pulse-skip or something related, allowing 5ms on-time while keeping current at 3200A peak.

you are SERIOUSLY SETTING AIR ON FIRE! That is plasma floating in the air after the arc is extinguished! I only saw this on high speed recordings of sparks, not in real life speed

I think the floating "plasma" is burning of smoke in the air.  At the start of the video section at 23:00 there is little of this.  After a strike to the smoke-generation target (between tripod and cage from video perspective), the floating remains are much more pronounced.  Color is yellow (compared to more blue-white of air plasma during arc), typical of the burning soot particles of smoke.  It is an interesting effect.  I wonder if the arc remnant could be made brighter if the smoke contained sodium compounds.  Or, perhaps sodium would color only the active arc and not the after-glow.

Perhaps the smoke effect is explained in Russian text or voice within the video.  It does appear intentional.  Interesting how the burning smoke forms a dotted line of separated glow spots.

[AstRii]

Interesting how the burning smoke forms a dotted line of separated glow spots.

Fun fact, this is due to plasma instability caused by the magnetic field. This instability is called "sausage instability".

You can see this instability during thunderstorm after a lightning hit, it also creates the same dotted spots pattern just like from the coil.
Plasma instabilities is what makes lightning travel in curved paths and not a straight line from electrode to electrode. It is also the reason why we haven't been able to start self-sustainable nuclear fusion.

[TeslaFX_rus]

What a power house of an inverter! Did you put any ways of measuring heat under IGBTs? To see if there is differences from outer to inner IGBT.

That is a very compact bridge design, love the snubber capacitor placement and the busbar work is very nice. Are those electrolytic capacitor banks from something 3-phased? Looks like those laminated busbars have some stickers like its industrial modules?

Going bigger is properly going to raise questions, if 3x400V is the way to go, maybe have to look for 3x690V, but I guess its rare to find. Using 10kV on the supply is properly too much of a space-cost-approach

Individual temperature measurement was not provided.  the only thing is that the cooler is equipped with a thermal switch that switches off when the temperature reaches 70 degrees.

Electrolytic capacitors were taken from old uninterruptible power supplies.  In fact, we talked, and it turned out that we need to increase the energy of capcitors.  Now the block has already been redone, and the capacitance on the DC bus is 0.12F.  We plan to put ionistors there for another 0.5F. (2x1F 420v)
So that we can run the Tesla coil for very long discharges, up to 50ms e.g. every half second, this is necessary to compensate for the voltage drop on the supply cable

What about increasing the voltage - now it is already difficult to do, since the DC capacitors in total turned out to be 700v

[Mads Barnkob]

Impressive coil!  Based on specs and performance, I'm guessing the controller is pulse-skip or something related, allowing 5ms on-time while keeping current at 3200A peak.

you are SERIOUSLY SETTING AIR ON FIRE! That is plasma floating in the air after the arc is extinguished! I only saw this on high speed recordings of sparks, not in real life speed

I think the floating "plasma" is burning of smoke in the air.  At the start of the video section at 23:00 there is little of this.  After a strike to the smoke-generation target (between tripod and cage from video perspective), the floating remains are much more pronounced.  Color is yellow (compared to more blue-white of air plasma during arc), typical of the burning soot particles of smoke.  It is an interesting effect.  I wonder if the arc remnant could be made brighter if the smoke contained sodium compounds.  Or, perhaps sodium would color only the active arc and not the after-glow.

Perhaps the smoke effect is explained in Russian text or voice within the video.  It does appear intentional.  Interesting how the burning smoke forms a dotted line of separated glow spots.

Fair enough, its not free balls of plasma lightning But its certainly something in the air, set at fire, which is impressive. Just look at this screen capture.


I have captured something similar on SSTC with 8000 FPS recordings, but much less apparent.

[hammertone]

I think the worlds largest is still Greg Leyh from Light on Demand www.lod.org has his modular/mobile 12 meter tall DRSSTC: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bellmine/sets/72157706088757021/

Gregs 1/3 size coil is a contender for sure, however it is not a DRSSTC, instead it is a proper Tesla Coil despite it's solid state spark gap.

Anyway, I am happy that I have started to monitor this list again, to witness this magnificent Russian coil. It is a great acheivement. Hats off!

Cheers, Finn Hammer