Extreme High Voltage: Water Drop Trigger Apparatus, Max Spark Rate Demo

WARNING: BRIGHT FLICKERING FLASHING LIGHTS
Please Don’t Watch if you are sensitive to flicker, flashing lights or have epilepsy.

Here’s another tour of the water-drop triggered spark gap experiment, showing the effect of the added capacitor bank compared with the plain output from the flyback HV power supply. I also crank up the droplet flow rate to show the range of spark rates available from the system.

The pops are a lot louder in person than they seem on the video. At one point where the rate is high I try to shout over the noise, and you can barely hear me on the soundtrack. Thank goodness for AVC gain controls!

I bottled the cap bank. I’m not too worried about a plain flyback output, it would make a hell of a burn but probably wouldn’t kill me. Add a few nanofarads of capacitance, though… and that would be a different story altogether. I don’t mind admitting that cap banks + high voltage == one scared koala…. but that just makes me more careful (knock on wood) while I’m having fun — and extending the boundaries of human knowledge.

Ahh… I just realized that I forgot to turn on the oscilloscope to show the output from the piezoacoustic power transducers. Oh well…. stay tuned for more exciting action a bit later on.

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