hey everyone I built
a better trigger
circuit for my flash tube stuff that I'm
going to use for the Ruby laser project
so I thought I'd show you how I did it
and what sort of flash tubes I can
trigger with it so here's the setup I've
got this electrophoresis power supply
charging up the capacitor bank there to
about 1,200 volts and the capacitor bank
is connected directly across the flash
tube kind of like this so the capacitors
that I'm just representing with one
symbol here are wired directly up to the
flash tube and we can do this because
1200 volts is not enough to break down
that xenon gas in the flash tube and
actually create a flash or a discharge
what we need is a trigger pulse and the
trigger is actually just a piece of wire
that's wrapped around to the outside of
the flash tube and if we put a really
fast rising edge high voltage pulse on
that trigger line it will ionize the
glut of the gas through the glass of the
flash tube and then lower the resistance
and suddenly all of that power that's in
the capacitor bank can discharge through
the flash tube the trick is that if your
flash tube is very long you need a very
high triggering voltage to ionize all of
that gas in there so this particular
flash tube over here is actually
relatively easy to trigger very small
flash tubes are even easier to trigger
just because there's less gas and less
distance between the electrodes so for
something like this little toy flash
tube project the trigger transformer can
be quite small this might take an input
of 50 to a few hundred volts and output
you know single-digit kilovolts for a
professional flash unit there's a
slightly larger flash transformer
trigger transformer this one probably
takes a few hundred volts in and
generates maybe 10 or 20 kV however the
circuit that I built is quite a bit more
powerful I'm using a automotive ignition
coil and dumping a 300 volt cap into it
and this generates about three
centimeter long sparks which should
correspond to about 90 kV
I need this high voltage in order to
trigger these large flash tubes that I
have for the Ruby laser project here's
the basic circuit diagram we've got a
300 volt rail coming in from the smaller
electrophoresis power supply and this
resistor is about 16 K ohm just to let
the supply know that there's something
there these electrophoresis power
supplies are sometimes reluctant to
start unless there's a load connected
then I added this diode just to try to
keep high voltage pulses from backing up
into the supply and this resistor limits
the charge rate of the main capacitor
I think this capacitor is about three
hundred microfarads at 350 volts the
trigger circuit couldn't be simpler it's
really just a switch and I put another
smaller cap across the switch just to
try to keep down destructive voltages
should those be generated across the
switch and closing the switch dumps that
capacitor right into the induction coil
or the ignition coil and we end up with
a high voltage pulse out in this case
the trigger line is that mesh of wire
wrapped around all the flash tube in
there and I've connected to it with this
high voltage 30 kV silicon wire that
goes into the ignition coil inside here
so all you have to do to run it is just
press the button and we get a nice flash
out of it and I've also got my
high-speed pin photodiode over there
connected to the oscilloscope so we can
see what the pulse of light looked like
in terms of duration
so to figure out the amount of energy
per flash we've got a one-half CV
squared C is 180 micro farad's those are
those two strings of capacitors that I
have wired up and the voltage is
actually 1200 minus 150 which is the
residual that's left in the capacitor
bank after it fires and so we end up
with about a hundred joules from the
scope we can see that about 66 percent
of this energy is a shot off in about
two hundred seventy-five microseconds
and then knowing that we can figure out
what the effective resistance of the
flash tube is and we get about an ohm
and a half which is that's reasonable
for flash tubes the effective resistance
actually depends on the amount of
current going through the flash tube so
there's this K constant that describes
what the effective resistance is
depending on on the current flow in this
case the current flow is probably not
all that much since it's a relatively
low power pulse in order to discharge
the capacitor bank what I do is shut off
the supply and then I have this 3300 ohm
thick film capacitor which I can touch
to the terminal here and draw a little
arc off and this will actually discharge
the bank slowly enough where it's easy
to deal with okay so next time I'll have
the real flash tube but I'm going to be
using with the Ruby laser hooked up it's
quite a bit bigger than this one even
and hopefully it will be triggering
reliably with that new larger trigger
circuit okay see you next time byeearn money online without investment for students, earn money by clicking ads, earn money online without investment, online earn money website, online jobs to earn money, best online income site, top 10 online money earning sites, easy income online, easy online earning, earn money online from home, make money online legit, earn money online free fast and easy, online earning websites list, genuine online money earning sites, online work to earn money, online surveys to earn money, earn money through internet, best online income, earn money online data entry, easy ways to make money online, best online earning websites, top websites to earn money, online typing jobs for students to earn money, earn skrill money online, earn skrill money, best way to earn money from home, make instant money online absolutely free, trusted online money making sites, online income site, best online earning, money online, earn money from home, earn dollars online, earn money online, earn money online 2019, earn money online by typing pages, earn money online daily, online work at home and earn money, online earning,
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