Musical Tesla Coil
After creating my plasma speaker, I wanted to see how big of a plasma arc I could get which led me to start designing my Musical Tesla Coil. This project is currently on hold until I can find a new work space.
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The coil I am working on is a Solid State Tesla Coil that can create music by turning the entire coil on and off at a certain frequency using an interrupter circuit. This coil was based off of Steve Ward's designs with modifications made to more easily source components and play music.
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Design
The tesla coil works by switching the primary at a resonant frequency which is dependent on the height of the coil, the topload, and environmental effects. Since it is constantly changing, the driver circuit changes its frequency based on what the antenna gets from the tesla coil. The antenna signal is sent into the MOSFET driver which controls the MOSFETs which the primary coil is connected to. The primary coil is made up of 8-10 winds of wire and operates at 170V DC. The secondary coil is made up of thousands of winds of 32 AWG magnet wire. This steps up the voltage to the kV range and plasma is generated off of a piece of metal on the top toroid. Music is created by interrupting the antenna signal at the corresponding frequency. A block diagram of the circuit is below.
The tubing is 4.5" in diameter and the entire tesla coil is around 3' tall. The secondary section is about 2' tall. PVC flanges were used for the base and toroid mount. The secondary coil was coated with polyurethane to prevent arcing from the top toroid. The top toroid is made up of aluminum duct in the shape of a donut and is connected to the end of the secondary.
Improvements: Several modifications and improvements need to be made before this is fully functioning. During the initial build of the circuit, I did not own an oscilloscope or any way to verify my wiring or circuit performance. There may have been errors that led to the poor performance on initial tests. On the first test, the rectifier immediately blew up due to a wiring mistake, and even after fixing it there were issues with rectifier performance due to components that were used as emergency replacement. On the second test, arcs were generated briefly before the MOSFETs overheated. Tuning of the circuit and higher rated components are planned for future improvement.