“I have posted on this coil several times in the past,” Mark Barton tells the Tesla list on 6 Feb 1996, and sums it up again. Rectified 220 V AC feeds an H bridge of four FETs per leg, which drives a tightly coupled primary directly. It runs 10 kW continuous and 40 kW pulsed, into a secondary of 22 AWG Teflon wire on a polyethylene barrel at 80 kHz. Continuous operation gives a 4 ft flat sheet of electrical flame. Pulsed operation gives the longer, forked look of a classical coil. Here the builder describes the envelope changing the spark, four years before Burnett photographed it. Alan Sharp kept the same coil on his own pages as “Sheets of Flame” (the card above). Dan McCauley's history of 2004 names Barton the first to drive the primary of a solid-state coil from a full bridge. No photograph of it has turned up.
Sources
- pupman.com: Mark Barton, 6 Feb 1996
- Internet Archive: Alan Sharp, Mark Barton's Sheets of Flame (28 Nov 1999)
- pupman.com: Dan McCauley, Needed: SSTC History and Achievements (8 Jun 2004)
This is the card from the driver tree, written from what the builder published. Send corrections through the forum.