PG13 Rev 1 1d - Karadimov

materials with a high resistance path between you and the chassis(greater than 100K ohms). Never use metallic conductors as you wouldthen become an excellent path to ground for line current or riskamputating your hand at the wrist when you accidentally contacted that1000 A welder supply!Don't attempt repair work when you are tired. Not only will you be morecareless, but your primary diagnostic tool - deductive reasoning - will notbe operating at full capacity.Finally, never assume anything without checking it out for yourself! Don'ttake shortcuts!Safety tests for leakage current on repaired equipmentIt is always essential to test AFTER any repairs to assure that no accessibleparts of the equipment have inadvertently been shorted to a Hot wire or livepoint in the power supply. In addition to incorrect rewiring, this could resultfrom a faulty part, solder splash, or kinked wire insulation.There are two sets of tests:DC leakage: Use a multimeter on the highest ohms range to measure theresistance between the Hot/Neutral prongs of the wall plug (shorted togetherand with the power switch on where one exists) to ALL exposed metal parts ofthe equipment including metallic trim, knobs, connector shells and shields,VHF and UHF antenna connections, etc.This resistance must not be less than 1M ohm.AC leakage: Connect a 1.5K ohm, 10 Watt resistor in parallel with a 0.15 uF,150 V capacitor. With your multimeter set on ACV across this combinationand the equipment powered up, touch between a known earth ground andeach exposed metal part of the equipment as above.WARNING: Take care not to touch anything until you have confirmed thatthe leakage is acceptable - you could have a shocking experience! Thepotential measured for any exposed metal surface must not exceed 0.75 V.If the equipment fails either of these tests, the fault MUST be found andcorrected before putting it back in service (even if you are doing this for yourin-laws!).Some notes regarding the above safety informationWhile the PG13 falls under the high voltage category, many of the safetyrecommendations do not apply due to the nature of high frequency highPG13 7

voltage. This is only true if you do not modify the kit in any way. Here is thereason why, which is very interesting:So here is the abridged answer to your question:Sodium channels are responsible for the initiation and propagation of actionpotentials. Action potentials are those electrical signals that carrymessages throughout the body whether they be neuronal or cardiac in nature.Sodium channels go through a basic gating scheme. Upon membranedepolarization, sodium channels open, or activate, then quickly inactivateor close. Upon repolarization, sodium channels will go back to the restingstate at which time they are capable of opening again. Channels require acertain amount of time to recover from inactivation or return to thisavailable resting state. This recovery from inactivation requires on theorder of 15 ms. The frequency at which action potentials fire is governed bythis recovery. So action potentials can fire about 60 times per second.Stimulation at higher frequencies would for all intents and purposes drivethose sodium channels near the point of the stimulation into a long livedinactivated state from which no action potentials could fire. So thus thereason why lower frequency stimulation would be more deleterious than a 2kHz frequency.Larry E. Wagner IITechnical Associate IIDept. of AnesthesiologyP.O. Box 604University of Rochester Medical CenterSimply put, your nerves are not fast enough to respond! Does this mean youare not getting electrocuted? No, but current flow is harmless at thesefrequencies. The real danger comes from RF burns, and that is what you willbecome aware of the most when you touch the wrong things. Burning fleshsmells awful by the way. When you feel a “tickle” from the PG13 it is eitherfrom a lower frequency component like 60 Hz, or the “tickle” of a nice RF burn.Yes, they HURT!PG13 8

HOW I ARRIVED AT THE PG13.(A little history, if you please!)Let me introduce myself. I am an engineer at Ramsey Electronics, and havebeen so for over 12 years now. Who said anything about company faithfulnessbeing dead? Anyhow since I was in high school I have been messing aroundwith high voltage, because it is a challenge, a bit risky, and is simplyfascinating. I suppose the fixation on high voltage stems from an earlierfascination with fire, but I won’t get into that. The connection is that fire and agood spark are both made of the same stuff: Plasma.This kit is NOT a Tesla Coil by any means, in fact it exhibits very little of theeffects that Tesla Coils use to achieve a very high output voltage. Tesla coilsuse a completely different effect from turns ratios to achieve a high voltageoutput, which involves transmission line theory, magnetic fields, and a lot ofpower. Tesla coil’s output voltages are dependant upon factors such atsecondary Q factors, and not as much on turns ratios. My PG13 is completelydependant upon turns ratios because the Q factor is too low to exhibit Teslaeffects.This project was conceived due to an inability to find those old flybacktransformers that do not contain diodes. Diodes convert the output of atelevision flyback transformer to DC, preventing them from working for manyAC experiments. I searched long and hard, and finally found a manufacturer ofa perfect experimenter’s coil. No more stopping at the side of the road at an oldconsole TV to see if the flyback is usable!So, what the heck is plasma, you may ask? No, it’s not the plasma in yourblood, swimming along with the red blood cells. Plasma is matter in anextremely excited state. Basically it is molecules being repeatedly stripped oftheir electrons, and then electrons falling back into place. The process ofelectrons falling into place is what gives sparks and fire (plasma) itscharacteristic colors. These colors are dependant upon the mixture of gasesthat the plasma is made up of, and how excited the gases are. Our atmosphereis mostly Nitrogen, with Oxygen and other gases thrown in as an afterthought.Nitrogen emits blues and violets mostly in a low excitement state, and that iswhy sparks appear violet at low currents, and blue as the current increases.Why is fire orange and yellow? Because particles such as carbon and ash inthe plasma are heated to incandescence, like the filament of a light bulb. If notfor the particles the flames would be blue, like Natural Gas burning.Aurora Borealis is another example of plasma In this case upper atmospheremolecules are excited by high energy particles from the sun. Auroras vary fromgreen to red, depending on intensity and elevation in the atmosphere. At higherelevations and low atmospheric pressures found in the upper atmosphere,Nitrogen will emit quite a bit of green. Down a few dozen kilometers closer toearth, Oxygen ionizes (turns to plasma) much more easily and Oxygen tends toemit red. That is why you see different colors in aurora.PG13 9

To see an aurora closely, we can use Plasma balls. Plasma balls operate byapplying a high AC voltage to an electrode in the center of a glass sphere. Thishigh voltage must be high frequency AC in order for any current to get throughthe glass of the globe and surrounding air by capacitive coupling to your handor the air. The current actually doesn’t go through the glass, but is induced oneither side. Typical voltages are around a few thousand volts for mostcommercial plasma globes, sometimes around 10,000 volts for somehomebrew ones. Typical frequencies are from a few kilohertz to a few tens ofkilohertz.Plasma balls will usually employ unusual gases such as helium, neon, xenon,krypton, and argon to achieve different colors and spark types. Since gasesusually ionize more easily at low air pressures, a plasma ball’s air is first suckedout with a vacuum pump, and then replaced with a mixture of the above gasesat about 1/10 to 1/20 of an atmosphere. These gases are noble gases, alsomeaning inert, which means that they don’t readily react with other moleculesand create dangerous results. There have been reports of Plasma balls workingat atmospheric pressure, and we may try that experiment here.I used a small water-controlled vacuum pump at home when I was a kid and alarge, green wine bottle. The best I ever got was 4” streamers at the verybottom, which were white due to the quantity of water vapor coming backthrough my hose. When your budget is 20 a month, you simply can’t afford avacuum pump.Now that I have a job, I can get all of those toys I always wanted as a kid (ifmy wife lets me!), but now I needed to make a new supply. My old one lookedlike a rat’s nest of wires, and the television flyback wouldn’t fit in any plasticcase that I could find. It was time to make a new one that looked nice, anddidn’t periodically shock me. I decided to use my resources here at work tomake a new kit as well as a new toy for me. (The wife won’t stop me if the bossis paying!)Happy experimenting, and I hope you enjoy playing with high voltage as muchas I do! Oh, here is a little reference I pulled from the Internet on gases and thecolors they make. Pretty neat!Colors and Effects of Various Gases (by Don Klipstein)Helium - In spectrum tubes it glows a brilliant whitish yellow-orange color,somewhat like that of a high pressure sodium lamp. I have heard that thissometimes varies with pressure, current, and container dimensions.Neon - Usually produces dim red blurry streamers with brighter orange "pads"at the ends. If neon is mixed with another gas (other than helium), the streamercolor and character is often dominated by the other gas, but the ends of thestreamer are orange or pink "pads".PG13 10

Carbon Dioxide - Glows a whitish or blue-white color. It is probably good tohave no direct contact with metal electrodes for long life with gases that are notcompletely inert. Carbon dioxide probably requires more voltage than the noblegases. Generally, gases and vapors with monoatomic molecules work with lessvoltage than others.Nitrogen - Streamers are usually a whitish or grayish pink or light orange. Thecolor may be more gray or lavender at very low currents. The apparent colorvaries with what kind of lighting it is in contrast with. Requires somewhat highervoltage than noble gases.Air, Oxygen, Water Vapor - These require more voltage than the noble gasesand do not glow brightly. I do not recommend these. If you must use any ofthese, you may also want no direct contact of gas or vapor to metal in order toavoid corrosion problems.Argon - Streamers are violet-lavender. The ends are blue-violet-lavender.Argon and neon. A mixture of around 99.5 percent neon, .5 percent argon hasthe lowest voltage requirement, but may not look as good as other gases.Argon-Nitrogen mixture (as found in many light bulbs) - Streamers are whitishor grayish pink or orange, but more lavender at low currents. The ends areblue-violet-lavender. Requires a bit more voltage than pure argon.Krypton - Generally lightning-like and close to white or light gray, sometimespurplish or pinkish, depending on background lighting. Sometimes fuzzier and/or gray-greenish, especially if the pressure and/or peak current are low.Xenon - Usually lightning-like and bluish white or bluish gray. May get fuzzierand more gray or lavenderish gray at lower pressure and lower peak current.Peak currents over a few milliamps favor a more lightning-like appearance evenif the RMS current is less than a milliamp.Don Klipstein's web site with plenty of great information on HV and G13 11

CIRCUIT OPERATIONWhat is going on with this board may look simple at first, but it is actuallyquite a difficult design to get working properly and reliably. A lot has to beconsidered with magnetics when dealing with high voltage, high frequencytransformers. Unlike power transformers like the one powering the entire kit,high voltage transformers have a “sweet spot”, or a resonant frequency wherethey operate the most efficiently. The goal of the design is to get it workingabove human hearing, otherwise the screech of high frequency from a plasmadischarge is deafening. When choosing the transformer for this design, Iwanted the best of everything: High Voltage output, High Current, HighResonant Frequency, and the ability to generate this from a relatively lowvoltage.The transformer company we found delivered four different transformers tous to experiment with, and a bunch of plastic spacers of varying widths. Thefour transformers had increasing numbers of secondary windings, but all otherfactors similar. The problem is that the more windings there are on thesecondary, the more inductance there is, meaning the resonant frequencywould be lower. The largest transformer which had 6500 turns in thesecondary would have been perfect to get 12 volts up to 25kV using a lownumber of turns on the primary, but the resonance was around 13kHz. Thesound this emits is intolerable for any length of time. The coil also had theproblem of having very thin wire resulting in a low current output. They have touse fine wire to make it fit in the transformer’s plastic case.The smallest coil had 2000 turns on the secondary, which isn’t quite enoughto get 25kV from 12V, even in a push-pull configuration. The problem here iswe really need more than one turn of wire on the primary to make an effectiveoutput. An advantage would be that the transformer oscillated around 35kHz,well above hearing, but almost too high for some effects we would like tomake.The transformer we wound up using was the third size, which has 4000windings on the secondary, which gives us plenty of high voltage output. Italso has the larger sized wire, and with the proper spacers would oscillateright around 18kHz. This frequency is above most people’s hearing, but yourdog won’t like this too much.So what do those spacers do? Without getting into magnetics too much, theylower the saturation point of the ferric core. This means the core saturatesfaster with a larger gap, which also translates to a higher operating frequency.This also means, however, that since the core saturates faster, less energywill be transferred from the primary to the secondary, which reduces poweroutput.PG13 12

We have included two 0.25mm spacers for you to do experiments with.Since the transformer is specific about its “sweet spot”, we couldn’t run thedrive circuit directly from a pulse width modulator circuit (PWM). We may havebeen able to tune it up really close while there was no load applied, but assoon as we would draw a spark, the frequency would change, and our outputwould drop considerably. For example if the “sweet spot” was 20kHz, and wewere driving the circuit with 20kHz, we may have 20kV on the output. Then, ifwe add a new load on the output that changes the “sweet spot” to 19kHz, butwe are still driving it with 20kHz, the output may drop to only a few kilovolts.Because of this we decided to make the transformer self-resonating. Thismeans as the load changes, so will the frequency, so that the transformer isalways running in the sweet spot.The way this oscillator works is by alternately saturating the core, first in onedirection, then the other. R1 and R5 are used as a “kick start” for the oscillator.These resistors provide some current to turn the transistors on. Because notwo transistors are perfectly alike, one will turn on before the other, providingan imbalance.In Figure 1, The transistor that is turned on stays on, forcing the othertransistor to turn off by directing current through the feedback winding of thetransformer in the direction required to turn the other transistor off, and turnitself on even harder. For this illustration we’ll say that Q3 is turned on whileQ4 is turned off. As this is occurring, magnetic flux in the core is building alongwith the current being drawn through Q3, because of the side of the windingQ3 is attached to. This current is drawn through the center tap of the primarywinding through the winding, and finally down through Q3 to ground. Thisrising magnetic flux in turn is inducing voltage and current in the high voltagesecondary, as well as the feedback winding. This current in the feedbackwinding pushes the transistor on even harder up to the point that the core ofthe transformer saturates.Fig 1.Fig 2.Direction of FluxDirection of Flux V High Voltage 12V-V High Voltage 12V-V High VoltagePG13 13 V High Voltage

Once saturation occurs, the flux stops increasing in the core, and the currentthat was induced in the feedback winding abruptly halts and reverses directiondue to a “ringing” effect. This reversal in current direction then turns off Q3and begins to turn on Q4, which quickly ramps up the flux in the core nowheading in the other direction. (Fig 2).This cycle goes back and forth continuously until power is removed.To control the output voltage we can simply adjust our driving voltage.Here’s why I chose a 12.6VAC transformer instead of a 16VAC transformer tobe used with your PG13.One quirk we have come across is that our high voltage design cannotproduce a high current arc directly to ground. For this to actually occur wewould need a lot more parts in the circuit, and also it would reduce the safetyconsiderably. We decided to go for safety and stick with a lower power design.Besides, you can pull some pretty hot arcs onto a screwdriver and otherobjects, no ground needed!To find out what we have for output voltage is a simple matter of turns ratios.See the chart below to see the transformer secondary windings that were inthe different models of transformers that I sampled.Winding Turns Wire Diam.CHT-0126A: 2000 0.1mmCHT-0126B: 2500 0.1mmCHT-0126C: 4000 0.1mmCHT-0126D: 6500 0.06mmSince we chose the C version of the transformer, we see that we have 4000windings in the secondary. Now we need to know what is in the primary. Sincewe were trying to achieve highest possible voltage output along with a decentcurrent output, I compromised at 9 turns center tapped on the primary. Sincewe are in a push-pull configuration, this essentially doubles our supply voltageacross the primary. So let’s say we have a 12.6 VAC transformer supplyingour kit, and we need to know what our output voltage will be. First we have tofind what the supply voltage will become after converting the 12.6VAC whichis an RMS value to the DC value after rectification. First we convert to peak topeak:12.6VAC * SQRT(2) 17.81 Vpk/pkThen we subtract 1.4 volts for the diode drops in the bridge rectifier.17.81—1.4 16.41 VDCNow realize that the 12.6VAC rating is at the current rating of thePG13 14

transformer, or under full load. In the case of the transformer we will besupplying, it is rated for 3 amps. We idle at 0.5 amps. This means the walltransformer will actually put out much more voltage under this low load. In factafter measuring this I found the rectified DC to be close to 19.2 VDC, which is17% higher than we would expect. Using this 19.2VDC, we can now find whatour output of the secondary will be. Since we are operating push-pull, 19.2volts will be across 1/2 of the primary at any given time, so we will say theprimary has 4 1/2 windings.19.2 V / 4.5 windings ? Secondary Volts / 4000 windings.Rearranging we get:? Secondary Volts 19.2 V * 4000 w / 4.5 wOr: 17,066 volts AC.Now you’re probably going to say: “Where’s the 20kV you promised?” Well

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