Ground Help Needed

Good evening comrades!

I am stuck on the design of my first Tesla Coil. Having built plasma speaker and having some experience with High Voltage, I must move forward with this project. I will be using 4 Microwave Oven Transformers in Series current limited by a series connected Balum. My question is: Should I or should I not Earth the center tap of the MOT stack that I will use to power my coil?

Here is my design:

Earthed Version



Un-Earthed Version

As an aside...do you have a link to your plasma speaker project?

Ken

KMoffett said:

As an aside...do you have a link to your plasma speaker project?

Ken

Click to expand...

No I am yet to submit a technical report on that to my school. Until than, I am not sharing my very unique design on it. Once I am given academic recognition for the plasma speaker I built, I will publish my technical report that will include all the circuits used in the project ( totaling five boards ).

Thanks!...looking forward to it.

Ken

As to your grounding question, it depends upon where the output of the coil is going. If it's just to the local circuit, then you don't need the earth ground. If you are planning on directing the output to some other earth grounded objects, then you should earth ground your circuit. Otherwise there could be arcing from the circuit ground to the earth ground.

crutschow said:

As to your grounding question, it depends upon where the output of the coil is going. If it's just to the local circuit, then you don't need the earth ground. If you are planning on directing the output to some other earth grounded objects, then you should earth ground your circuit. Otherwise there could be arcing from the circuit ground to the earth ground.

Click to expand...

Thanks, your logic here is flawless.