Solid State Tesla Coil (SSTC) Part 1
Вставка
- Опубліковано 21 лип 2024
- This is the first part in series where I'm going to try to build a solid state tesla coil (SSTC) without any prior experience in doing so.
In this video i start off driving a tesla coil with a ZVS oscillator circuit connected to the primary, which doesn't work very well because there's no ability to adjust the frequency (aside from sliding a contact along the primary coil) and driving at resonance is unstable because the ZVS circuit will want to "drift off" when it sees the huge load that occurs at resonance.
The second, somewhat more successful circuit used a 555 timer to drive a single MOSFET on/off to oscillate the primary at resonance. This allowed me to dial in the resonant frequency with trimmer knobs, but it was easy to overshoot it, and i killed several MOSFETs in the process.
The FET I'm using for all these videos is an IRF250, and the videos shown are mostly with 12V of input, although in some of the clips there's 30V in. I use a PNP-NPN pair as a push-pull driver for the gate, but since these aren't moving more than about 200 mA, i think the gate isn't being driven hard enough, which is causing huge switching losses.
In the next video, I'm going to cover the proper procedure for tuning a tesla coil with an oscilloscope, driving the primary coil using feedback signals from the secondary coil, and techniques to avoid obliterating my MOSFETs.
Music Used:
Heatley Bros. - 8 Bit Go
Serge Pavkin - Fractal
Serge Pavkin - Tech
Nice! Looking forward to part 2!
Amazing video with very good explanation. Keep it up dear.
Short story of the dead mosfet made my day :D I like this kind of the sense of humor =]
Great video
Great video
Thanks for sharing
Your walk through of finding the resonant freq by getting the circuit to ring is very good. I figured it out through lots of trial and error back when I was building coils.
Re. the stray L and C of the probes: wouldn't you be able to mitigate some of this by NOT making contact with the top load? I.e. clip the probe's ground to the probe (so make a little circle), and bring it close to the coil.
That's what I do
Great job on explaining it all as you go from part 1 to 2 and the last number 3 videos! Thank you for sharing! Would you suggest a very simple small TC that uses IRFP460, that I can make in few days? We have a show for people and I like to have a small TC demonstrator that is fairly safe. The once I've tried from youtube channels didn't work at all. I have a coil of 800 turns on 2.5" plastic tube, using 0.27 mm (30 AWG) magnet wire. I also have an aluminium toroid that is 153mm across and 38mm thick. I'm not near as advanced in electronics as you are, but if I have a good circuit to follow, I can put it together. I have a real large TC that I've made, but SSTC is beyond my ability to troubleshoot. Thanks again.
If you use the schematic from part 2 of my SSTC series that should work pretty well. Sounds like the coil you have will probably work, it's just a matter of getting the frequency dialed in
Very good
Haha man you're crazy running it off your bench PS :p I've killed more than one bench PS from the noise thrown back by the driving circuitry.
Hello there! I've made a small TC and it's resonant frequency it's about 1.7 MHz.
Do you have any idea on what oscillator i can use to achieve such high frequency to drive the mosfets?
in theory a zvs driver can do that but you'll need to select the right FETs and diodes to handle the speed
Hello, your SSTC looks cool even if it's not at its best performance... Perhaps a TL494 plus a MOSFET gate driver chip can help? I'm not sure, I'm just trying to come up with ideas😅
That's pretty close to the approach I'm looking at for part 2, where I'll use an IR2153 to drive the gate from a cleaned-up feedback signal from the secondary coil - either with an antenna or a signal transformer
To really drive the mosfets efficiently at this frequency range, I need close to 10A (for very brief periods) to charge the FET gate quickly enough
@@HyperspacePirate We're hoping for your success on this endeavor🙂
By the way, you might find it interesting to check Steve Ward's SSTC circuits, although they are more complicated than at first glance😅
Hallo, Minute 5:14 the circuit, the 555 timer run with max. 18 volt. Is your circuit right ???
But the mutual inductance between the primary and the secondary will also affect your resonance frequency.
Its air, humidity perhaps?
how can you control the output frequency say for example you wanted to get to a particular frequency aside from 50khz or 60khz without affecting the output voltages?
I use a 555 timer for the second driver circuit with a frequency that's controlled by a potentiometer
@@HyperspacePirate worked for a while, blew transistors, couldn't achieve desired VHF of at least 1ghz.
@@JW-nq6do Check out my second video on SSTC's, it explains a lot about how to avoid blowing up your transistors.
Idk why you're trying to run 1 ghz though. A typical tesla coil is like 100 khz - 500 khz or around that neighborhood
@@HyperspacePirate i need the coil output to be at least that frequency to move on to the next stage of my project.
I don't have a oscilloscope
How can I see the Webforms ..... Any other way ???
Not that I'm aware of, tbh
@@HyperspacePirate
😓
You could have just used a waveform generator to the bottom of the coil through a 10k resistor and oscilloscope on the secondary side of resistor. Adjust until amplitude shows.
Forgot to mention that I really love your work. Your breakdown of the engineering in all your videos is really informative.
I’m not getting this. How would connecting the scope on the other side of the resistor work?
You adjust the frequency until you get maximum voltage rise on the scope. And that is your resonant.
Right, right. I got lost. Thank you!
You should have just put 3 fets in parallel