Flashlamp Video

[Draco]

I have some experience with radioactive items, i even have some of the fused sand from the trinity site(took me some time to find it from a credible company, lot of you find online is fake) and i have a clock that will put thorium to shame when it comes to radioactivity lol, at lest for the welding rods, i am still trying to locate the rods.

I will work on repairing the case, the dent in it violated any safe clearance to the transformer. I may be wrong on the 3kva or the documentation i have is wrong,the calculator puts it closer to 5kva. The switch on the case connects to a switch to select the primary voltage and the secondary is 240 center tapped and whats nice is it's a dual secondary so i can parallel it for 120. with oil it weights 330 pounds, new copper secondary and the primary is made from aluminum.
finding the top bushings took the most time, the ceramic for the low voltage side was cracked as well but i think i can make and interconnect with bolts or just glue them. since the transformer is in a stable place i put the case to a low priority. i may even contact http://www.t-r.com/ they refurbished it and sold directly to me, they may have the secondary terminals i need and a seal for the lid.
the transformer as been out of the contaminated oil for over a year now, i have thought about making a bag to fit in it to draw vacuum on it to see if i can get any more gook out of it. any ideas? due to the cost of new oil i was wondering if there are any substitutes i could use for cleaning any possible water out, lol it at-lest smells like it should now

[Draco]

I know i face something near impossible with the dang pole pig but it did not fail while energized and ever since that damned fire i have never applied voltage to it since, oddly the windings are insulated with fabric that would soak in the oil, it's in rough shape but i believe i can fix it , water did damage spacers made from paper but other parts seem just fine, the dang thing had just been refurbished and PCB free oil, i still have the lab report for that.
i had gotten it for use in a Tesla coil that has yet to be built, using this to charge caps is some thing i had not considered till this thread got going, i just want to make sure this thing is clean before i put it in new oil due to the cost of the oil, it will still be ugly as sin but should function. I will be configuring it for 120, i do have a step up transformer but my variacs are 120 only

[Draco]

I found the Thoriated rods , i got them in 3.17mm size, thats the largest practical that i can work with, oddly i cant wait to get my Geiger counter on it to see how much above background they are, i have the view that is standard precaution of not inhaling dust that most radioactive things are over blown, our species as adapted to deal with the minimum radiation as long as it's not inhaled. i have always been fascinated with radioactive items and low level stuff is not the work of demons. humans forget the square inverse law for this stuff, so basically dont eat it or inhale the dust. if there is interest i can upload some pictures of my stuff, i was damn lucky to get Trinitite, it's restricted and only certain places have it but i find it so awesome that i have a direct connection to the USA's first atomic test. I have a thorium mantel that was used in the older gas fed camping lights and i have some uranium metal shavings as well , that is some strong stuff, i expected it ro be more soft, most of my stuff i got from united nuclear , i try to be an element collector in the works, i just we could plutonium, it's not currently.
The Square Inverse law means if you dubble your distance to the source your exposure is attenuated 4 times so you get .25% of the total exposure so the souce would need to be powerful,
I have a working turn of the last century geissler tube and i cant get my dad near it and the ironic thing is he has recived radiation treatments so he know's the level is not dangerous.
http://s124.photobucket.com/user/dra...4.jpg.html?o=0
when i can take pictures i will upload in a different thread. the golden hour clock i mentioned with a date pre to 1957 used radium and i had 3, now just one and the hands to the other two and with the beta window open and right on the tube they over range both of my meters of is a civil defense cdv-700 and the other is an arduino based kit i built from a kit, it;s in a nesting interlocking hobby cases i think i got at Walmart, i have a hole cut into the box so i can atlest get some beta sensitivity.

as i had mentioned before that i am autistic so my hobbies drift around like that, it can some times shift quick

[planters]

Sorry my English is very bad!

Once again, let me repeat. Your English is quite good and better than my Deutsch and infinitely better than my French. I can understand you quite well, so you should be assured that your posts are appreciated.

Now, lets talk! The ablation regime begins around 30J/cm^3. We discussed this earlier on this forum. There is evidence of Si and O2 lines appearing in the spectrum at this energy level and the gas removed from these lamps contains SI and O2 and the quantity of this gas has been quantified. In fact, as the discharge energy increases the quantity of ablated material increases, becoming nearly proportional to the energy deposited.

An interesting fact is that the duration of the discharge is not well described as to its relationship to the onset of ablation. In the two papers that I refer to, the pulse durations were on the order of several usec, but this was not varied or studied.

I still do not understand the appearance of your flash lamp envelope. If the material is quartz or borosillicate and the surface is slowly ablating due to the discharge process then it should be clear. There may be small scratches due to ejected electrode material or a little of this electrode material itself, lying within the tube (I have seen both these phenomena), but not a blue haze.

For what it is worth, I am using a 100uF x 5,500V capacitor. This is one of the capacitors that make up the 4 capacitor bank in the laser you see in the background in the video. In that laser, with a system inductance of 1.050 uH, the 22,000V system has a discharge time of 10 usec, a laser pulse width of 4 usec at threshold and 9usec at high energy.

I have discovered a few interesting facts about these high energy lamps. They saturate! As you increase the energy to a given lamp, the output, both the total and the peak increase rapidly. When you reach approximately 20J/ cm^2 of internal surface area, the output will continue to increase, but only due to duration. The peak ceases to increase. No matter how fast the discharge, this 20J/cm^2 barrier remains. This is probably why the very highest energy dye lasers (to date) have succeeded with coaxial lamps with their high surface to volume ratio. Yet, if I remember correctly, because these lamps operate as a black body, placing a reflector on the outside does not increase the peak energies of these lasers. It acts to return energy to the plasma which re-radiates it and increases the output by increasing the duration of the pulse.

Despite its high UV transmittance, quartz tends to block radiation much below 200nm. At temperatures of 10's of K degrees substantial amounts of the short wavelength light is unable to leave the lamp, no matter what the design. Even the detector response and the atmosphere become limitations in the VUV region.

[Draco]

Fromm what understand is that UV below 200nm ionizes the air as well, the low end of the UVC my rock lights generate is said to only travel not even a foot before it's blocked by air, items that need the very short wavelengths needs to be in vacuum.
Now i wish i had a dye laser to try this with, if you sealed and pumped the air out of optical cavity if there would be a measurable difference in laser output.

VUV vacuum ultraviolet?

I just got outbid on 1/8th thick thorated tungsten rods so the search still goes on.
I wanted to start with 1/8 as i have the tooling for that in plenty and atlest online the rods are fairly cheap, ironically I enjoy TIG welding, i had an employer that would let me learn on stainless steel scrap they had laying around
in my younger days we would try to find stuff to put in thermite and got a kick out of the tungsten and another alloy used for jet engine parts where unaffected by the heat, this was before i knew the melting temp of these metals is much higher then thermite

[planters]

if you sealed and pumped the air out of optical cavity if there would be a measurable difference in laser output.

No. The solvents don't transmit well either. Only pure water will get down to 200nm or so and the organics begin to cut out around 240nm. The best, methanol and ethanol cut out by about 220nm.

Pure tungsten works nearly as well, You're probably going to face more limitations due to your gas handling/vacuum system and quartz tube than the differences in the rods. You don't have to knock yourself out obtaining a rod.

[Draco]

is 1/8th over kill or ok? i normally would go metric but my tools are not.

china for the win on electrodes, i found a vendor that has them for about a buck each, and i can use them for a check source for my Geiger counters

[planters]

The diameter needs to be related to the ID of the tube. Too small and the discharge is going to make a lot of contact with your bulk electrode and if that's brass then it will erode. I'm using 1/4" in a 13mm ID tube. This works well.

[Draco]

Ok cool, the id i have is 10mm so i can up it a bit more if i can find the rods that large

[Draco]

I amm thinking of putting my caps on this http://www.harborfreight.com/18-in-x...lly-61899.html
make themm more mobile and more isolation from the floor, i can they make a plexie box a lot easier to then

my polepig transformer is one one i built from 2x4 and industrial casters