Music, Magic and Mayhem with Tesla Coil | ElectroBoom

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Music, Magic and Mayhem with Tesla

Coil
Posted on May 26, 2015

Tesla coil is not all about big and loud sparks:

DISCLAIMER: The circuit I made works and can output music, but it is very hard to tune and
operate and can blow up easily too! Well I designed it so what do you expect?! It was the
fast and dirty solution to make arcs sing. So if you like to take the challenge and make it, be
very careful and patient. I should design a better circuit when I have a chance.
Tesla coils can be very quiet, or musical! Isnt that strange? I always thought an arc makes a
big sound. But the noisy ones only make big sound because they have low frequency
components in them.
If you dont care about the circuit and want some answers to what you saw in the video, skip
all the way down to Explaining Video Scenes.

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Tesla Coil and Solid State Driver

But before I elaborate on the circuit:

IMPORTANT SAFETY NOTES:
Death is close by, try to prevent it!
The radiation from this device can easily interfere with electronic devices, like pace
makers. be very careful. All my touch screens were messed up being within a meter of
the coil.
This circuit can burn your skin badly (see picture at the end)
If you go back and read my Slayer Exciter article, there I explained that it is made of two
windings, a primary with very few turns (around 10), and a secondary with many turns
(around 1000 and above). But what you should know is that every inductor has a stray
capacitive component and every capacitor has a stray inductive component.
For the secondary we intentionally increase the capacitance by adding the top load (the
toroid on the top) which crease capacitance to the surrounding material.
This capacitance and secondary inductance create a sharp resonance frequency, which is
very sharp! It basically means that only at that resonance frequency you will have a virtually
infinite impedance, where all the energy can be radiated in the surrounding world.
That frequency is :

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Where f is frequency, L is the inductance and C is the capacitance.

Now for the primary to be able to transfer the maximum power to the secondary and radiate
it to the air, primary must also oscillate at the same exact frequency. In old time Tesla coils or
spark gap type in general, a capacitance is also added on the primary side that is tuned to
resonate with the primary inductance at the same exact frequency. You see the spark gap
type driver below. It is still a very practical method when you need to make extremely large
voltages.

This is one of the ways Tesla did it

In this type, the AC power input which is typically at 50Hz or 60Hz is amplified by a
transformer to thousands of volts, which charges the high voltage (HV) capacitive. In every
cycle of the AC, the capacitor voltage reaches very high voltage twice (negative and positive
peaks),which is enough to break through the spark gap. The ionized air of the spark gap
shorts air, and the HV capacitor to the primary of the Tesla coil. Now the capacitor is across
the primary which will oscillate at the secondary resonance frequency, transferring all that
energy and creates a super huge voltage on the output of secondary.
The super loud noise of this type is simply because you have a lightening every 100Hz or
120Hz.

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Having a solid state driver, like a slayer exciter or the one I explain below, you can run your
circuit continuously at the resonance frequency using the fast circuitry that can oscillate at
coils resonance frequency. Below is the schematic of the circuit I designed.
This circuit takes two input supplies, one at 12V at J1 connector, for which I used a 12V wall
adapter, and VSUP, which I used my lab power supply at 32V for this video. You can also
make the 12V from VSUP using an on board inverter. Originally I wanted to use my Full
Bridge Rectifier and run VSUP at 170VDC rectifying the 120VAC. But that voltage was too
big for my circuit and for the reasons I also explained in my Tesla Coil Half Way Report my
MOSFETs (Q1 to Q4) blew up. I have plans to get around the issue but for now I discovered
much beauty even at lower powers!

Solid State Tesla Coil Driver

Heres the Bill of Material for my circuit:

R1 and R4: 1k Ohm

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R2 and R3: 10k Ohm

R5: 100 Ohm
R6: 2.7 Ohm
POT1: 1-1623849-0 (multi-turn trim potentiometer)
POT2: any single turn 100k potentiometer
C1 and C4: 100uF, >16V
C2 and C5: 10uF, >16V
C3, C6 and C8: 100nF, >16V
C7: 100pF, >10V
L1: 10uH, >2A
U1: MC78L05BP-AP or similar 7805 5V regulator
U2 and U3: MCP6562-E/SN (dual comparator in one package)
U4: MIC4452YN (MOSFET driver IC)
Q1 to Q4: SCT2450KEC (Power MOSFET, 10A, 1200V)
This circuit is pretty simple. The 5V supply is created by U1 that feeds the low power
comparator and OpAmp circuits.
The 12V supply is separately filtered through L1 and capacitor to supply U4, the MOSFET
gate driver. The reason is that this driver draws large current spikes to quickly drive the
MOSFET gate capacitors and the noise on the supply can easily effect the oscillator circuit,
while we need an accurate frequency. It is also important to pay attention to the ground
routing. Make sure the ground for the oscillator circuit is not supplied through power circuits
(MOSFETs, gate driver).
U2 circuit is an Schmitt trigger oscillator circuit. Its frequency can be tuned somewhere
between 500kHz to 1.5MHz using the POT1 potentiometer. My Tesla coil resonance
frequency is around 1MHz. The output of the oscillator circuit where Ive taken it from the
capacitor C7 is a saw tooth waveform. I did it intentionally because I wanted to create a
variable duty cycle PWM signal. So I compare the saw tooth signal with a DC voltage
created by POT2. Depending on the level of the DC voltage, the duty cycle of the PWM can
be tuned. Below is how the PWM changes by the DC level compared to saw tooth signal
(click to make it move). This is similar circuit I used in Making an Electric Tooth Brush. Just
that my PWM signal is inverted to what you see below. I didnt want to remake this gif just for
an inverted signal!

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PWM Signal generated by comparing a sawtooth wave with a DC level (click to see
animation)

Now the PWM goes through U4 gate driver which will switch MOSFET transistors Q1 to Q4
on/off. I used 4 transistors so that they can share power between them and dont get too hot.
I also mounted them on a heat sink because they get quite hot.
Now when MOSFETs turn on, the primary is charged with current and when they turn off, the
energy converts into a large voltage spike on primary that generates large voltages on
secondary. The arcs are very quiet, like I mentioned and you seen in the video.
Important Functional Notes:
Very important! Dont use metal a screw driver to tune your circuit. It may burn your
finger and it will mess up your frequency. Use a plastic or wooden, rather long screw
driver. I carved my screw driver from a long stick.
The arcs will not jump out directly from the toroid as it still doesnt have mega volt
levels. You need to simply place a rod or some metal with a sharp tip so arc can jump
out of it.
You need to accurately tune the frequency for the arcs to come out. But every coil has
its own resonance frequency. To find what it is, make the simple Slayer Exciter circuit.
When your coil works well with the exciter, probe the base of the transistor with a
scope and measure the frequency and voila! you know the resonance frequency.
The resonance frequency can greatly change based on the environment around the
coil. For example if you bring your hand close, or place different objects around it, the
stray capacitance will change, changing the resonance frequency. This circuit, unlike
the Slayer Exciter, doesnt have a feedback to automatically tune the change. So if you
change something, re-tune the frequency to get biggest arc. For example in my video,
for every scene I had to re-tune it based on what I was bringing close to the toroid. It
will be close to the original frequency though, so turning POT1 back and forth a bit,
you will find the peak.
For maximum power, tune the PWM duty cycle to 50% to 60%. Above or below this
duty cycle will not yield any more power.
Before applying VSUP, turn the 12V supply on, make sure all your circuit works, tune
the frequency to what the resonance is supposed to b. Then turn VSUP on at a lower
level and tune your arcs a bit, then ramp it up to maximum (32V in my case). Then
tune the frequency further (very slowly) to get the arcs going best.
Dont run the circuit for too long as the MOSFETs will get quite hot and can burn, killing
R6 and U4 with them. A good heat sink is important.
On that note, buy many spare parts!
VSUP can be further increased. I have tried 45V also and my arcs get bigger. I have
also tried 170VDC from my bridge rectifier with large arcs. But it is on the edge of
destruction there. If you have an auto transformer, you can tune down the AC supply to

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your bridge to protect the FETs but yet get bigger arcs. The reason they break at
higher voltages is that when the MOSFETs turn off, the primary voltage jumps high. If it
goes above the 1200V rating of the FETs, they enter avalanche mode and get very hot
and eventually break. Great heat sinking is key.
The arcs may get noisier at higher power because they will start loading the supplies
and VSUP wouldnt be a nice and clean DC, creating noise at the output.
POT2: something you should note that U4 has a strange behavior. When the input
PWM duty cycle goes below some value around 10%, the output of U4 actually
generates bigger PWM and can jump close to 100%. That is not good. So make sure
you know what that level is on your potentiometer and not go below it. You can add a
15V series resistor between your POT and ground. Thats what I used and it ensures
the DC voltage doesnt go too low.
One more important thing, make sure physical bottom side of both windings are
connected to DC levels (primary bottom to VSUP, secondary bottom to ground or
VSUP). If you do it another way, you may get weaker sparks.
I connected the primary to my circuit using alligator clips as shown in picture below.
The red wire is VSUP and the black wire is coming from the MOSFETs. Moving the
black wire can change the number of primary turns. You can increase the size of your
arc by tuning the black wire location.

Primary Connections of the Tesla Coil

You might ask why I didnt use a feedback like the slayer exciter circuit to auto tune the
resonance frequency. It was because I wanted to make high quality audio, which was very
simply done with this circuit. Having audio is also possible with the auto-tuned circuit, but
you will get saturated sounds with that one, not a nice music like this one with such simple
circuit, unless you want to get fancy with your driving circuit. Heres a snapshot of the circuit:

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Tesla Coil Solid State Driver Circuit

Making the Most Dangerous Speaker

Now I moved POT2 and placed an OpAmp Circuit shown in picture below. J2 is an audio
jack, or in my case I just cut a broken headphone cord and soldered it to my circuit. I could
plug the jack to my cellphone or laptop.
U5 circuit basically amplifies the audio, with a gain tunable with POT3. POT2 still has the
same effect as before. It tunes the average duty cycle while the audio input modulated the
duty cycle with audio signals around the average PWM. The change in PWM creates a
change in output power of arcs and so creates sound.

Tesla Coil Solid State Driver with Audio

Heres the Bill of Material for new components:

U5: Any standard OpAmp with an output that can reach zero would work. I used
LM358.
POT3: Same at POT1, multi-turn potentiometer

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R7: 1k Ohm
R8: 10k Ohm
C9: 10uF >10V
Now this is some manly speaker! Why would anyone create sound using a diaphragm when
you can use arcs instead?!

Explaining Video Scenes:

Yes, the arcs are very quite like I explained. This is especially great because it means
you can play music with it without too much background noise.
When you bring a florescent light close, it turns on. The super high voltage excites the
florescent material in the lamp like I explained in Slayer Exciter video.
Using the incandescent light is pretty cool. You can see the plasma made in the lamp
and the flow of electrons like dancing flames. The special form of plasma in the bulb is
due to the gas in it. As you see in the video as soon as the glass melts and breaks
under the extreme heat of the arcs, regular air gets inside and the arcs look the same
as ones in the air.
Of course the glass is non conductive. What you should remember is that there is no
continuous one way flow of electrons. The arcs you see are electrons jumping back
and forth at 1MHz frequency. This means that at that high of a voltage we just have a
capacitor between the toroid and the light bulb contacts attached to my hand. The
capacitor insulation is air and glass. In every 1MHz cycle, the electrons jump to the
glass pushing the electrons inside the bulb away, and then the toroid sucks them back
in leaving positive charge at the glass, which will pull the electrons into the bulb, and
thats the flow of electrons creating the plasma. There are no electrons passing the
glass, of course until it breaks.
My spinning wheel, it was beautiful! Theres a jet of electrons shooting from the ends,
of course, but it is not the weight of electrons jumping out that turn the wheel, no siree!
The mass of electrons is almost zero. And they are not jumping out anyways, they are
jumping out and in at 1MHz frequency. So what is turning the wheel? It is the
expansion of air due to the heat of arcs that pushes the rod away. The arcs are pretty

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hot. In fact when I bring my hand close to them, I can feel the heat rising from them.
The arcs dont zap like regular electricity. Yes, that surprises me too. It has something
to do with the no noise nature of these arcs too. If arcs make noise, they are much
more dangerous! Why? Two reasons: first, at such high frequencies like 1MHz, your
nerves or muscles dont react to the electricity, so you wont shake or jump. But it is not
really the reason why they are less dangerous. Second: they are less dangerous
because of something called Skin Effect, which is not about human skin, but rather
conductor surface (skin). Look it up. Basically as the frequency rises, electromagnetic
fields are created in a conductor that push the flow of current to the surface of the
conductor in a thinner skin, and less is passed through the central area of the
conductor. Thats called skin effect. For 1MHz, the most of current can only penetrate
around 60 micro-meter deep into a conductor. For a human, it means it will no go deep
enough to effect vital organs like brain or heart and remains on the surface of body.
The arcs that make noise have low frequency components in them in audible range.
These frequencies can penetrate deeper in the body, shake muscles and be lethal.
The arcs, jumping directly to the finger, burn the skin black. See my picture below for
burns from all that testing. The reason is that the arcs enter a small spot and all that
energy through a single spot makes a localized hot spot burning the skin. Another
reason is that the skin is made of dead non-conductive cells. So when the arcs pass
through such high resistance layer, they create a lot of heat and burn it. As soon as
electricity reaches conductive tissues, it disperses around to larger surfaces that
generate much less heat.
But why doesnt it hurt when I hold a metal in my hand and touch the arcs with it?
Because the metal provides a greater surface to my hand and rather than a spot, there
is a bigger area for electrons to move into my hand. So the heat dissipates on a bigger
surface rather than a spot and doesnt burn anymore. Also when I hold the metal, I put
a pressure which makes the non-conductive skin thinner and less resistive. But if I
touch the same metal at a single point with not much pressure, it burns my skin.
Why do the arcs jump to a floating metal object like my screw driver? Simple! It is not
like they jump to the screw driver to jump somewhere else. Screw driver is like another
plate of a capacitor, which has a tiny bucket of charges in it. So what the coil does is
that it sucks out and pushes back in that tiny amount of charge away/to the screw
driver.
Even when the arcs are not jumping to the screw driver it zaps my finger. Screw driver,
just being close enough to the coil, peaks up electric fields, like another plate of a
capacitor. Those fields are so strong that they can suck/push charges from my finger.
I love the audio I created. I showed you two tuning of the circuit, one that sounded nice
and smooth, and the other which sounded saturated and jumpy. For the smooth one,
you have to raise the PWM to around 50% and reduce the audio gain to prevent any
saturation of PWM signal. For the saturated one, you have to lower the PWM so much
that arcs dont jump. But then raise the gain so much that the PWM level can jump to
50% or 60% or more. That way the low level audio doesnt pop out, but usually the
bass which is a higher pop pushes a high PWM and causes the arcs to jump. And the
arcs created this way can jump further too.
The popping arcs from my saturated audio jump much further and sharper than the
fuzzy arcs of the smooth flow. I believe the reason is that when the arcs are continuous
and consistent in level, the air all around the pin is ionized and the energy flows in

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every direction continuously like you see. This makes the arcs shorter too as they are
not focused anymore. But when they pop out in single bursts, the air has time to create
only one ionized channel and all energy flows through there. So it jumps further.
Now if you wonder how my skin looks like after so much burning, here it is. All those burns
were surface deep and the black burns could be washed away, although they left small
blisters here and there, because, well, they were hot! Dont burn yourselves! and DO YOU
REALLY KNOW HOW I GOT THOSE BURNS?!
You may thing I got them from touching the coil. Half of them maybe, but the other half was
from touching metals around me, or turning the damn camera on/off! Every time I tried to
touch something while the coil was running, it would burn me. Just sitting close to the coil,
my body would peak up enough energy to zap any metal I touched, same as touching the
screw driver in the video. Almost ten times I forgot to turn the coil off, while tried to turn the
camera off and saw smoke coming from my hand and camera. Fortunately the camera was
not damaged.

My finger burns from Tesla Coil

And more shots of my beautiful coil:

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Tesla Coil with Solid State Driver

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Tesla Coil with Solid State Driver

This entry was posted in Electricity and tagged amplifier, arcs, audio, audio amplifier,
audio output, burn, coil, driver, electricity, electroboom, electronics, florescence,
florescent, high current, high voltage, low noise, magic, mehdi, mehdi sadaghdar,
mosfet, mozart, music, OpAmp, plasma, playing mozart, power, resistor, resonance,
sadaghdar, shock, skin effect, solid state, sound, spark, speaker, stray, stray
capacitor, tesla, tesla coil, top load, transformer by Mehdi S.. Bookmark the permalink
[http://www.electroboom.com/?p=575] .
410 THOUGHTS ON MUSIC, MAGIC AND MAYHEM WITH TESLA COIL

Victor
on January 14, 2017 at 8:26 pm said:

Hello mehdi I have a little doubt that the MOSFET MIC4452YN works and there is
some kind of replacement for this. Greetings and thanks

Matthew S
on January 11, 2017 at 3:21 am said:

Hello Mehdi,
What effect will adjusting POT 3 achieve?
Thanks!

Matthew S
on January 11, 2017 at 6:13 am said:

I know that it affects gain, but this is a concept that i do not understand.

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