I am making a tea nitrogen laser based off the rimstarorg youtube channel. I have a perfect setup as seen below
I use 11, 1kv diodes to convert my 7,500 volt lug on my neon sign transformer to DC. My dielectric, well, i tried everything from transparency paper, to mylar, to acrylic and i tried multiple layers for each one.
Yeah thats what happened. So I eventually just tried setting up a piece of aluminum foil on the bottom, my dielectric, and then one aluminum sheet with my spark gap, and for some reasonthe spark jumps between the bottom of my 2 angle pieces before it jumps between the TWO CLOSEST POINTS AKA THE SCREW THATS 1mm AWAY!!
I should also mention when i used just one piece of transparency paper this happened:
Please help me on where to even go from here, i don't even know what I'm doing wrong at this point
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$\begingroup$ The spark will always jump at the points of highest electric field strength (gradient). Possibly there are residual imperfections on the angle pieces? You want everything to be as smooth as possible so that your screws will be where the peak field gradients are. $\endgroup$– Carl WitthoftMar 7, 2018 at 16:25
1 Answer
I finally fixed it, to people who are confused please listen. In some videos you see that there is a spark at the spark gap every 2 seconds or so. This is not gonna be true all the time, in fact there was hardly anything wrong with my laser at all! I just had to leave it plugged in. Yes its loud as hell and it looks like its just sparking with no let up but if you look left at your piece of paper to see the beam, you will be surprised to see that everything has worked! Check out my laser working https://youtu.be/lU-eeZtHVeE