Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

Using Capacitor to provide a short blast of high voltage

Status
Not open for further replies.

Voltz

New Member
If I charged a 1F Capacitor to 5V is there a way I could get a brief blast of say 1kV or something like that
 
Yes, connect it to a huge transformer.
 
You don't need the huge capacitor. Just get a 12V power supply and an ignition coil. You will get many many kilovolts out of it if you use a MOSFET to switch the primary windings on and off. Just do a google search for ignition coil driver.
 
Capacitors store energy in a way that the voltage is whatever voltage they were charged to. You can get a huge current as the capacitor is discharged, but the voltage is never higher than what the capacitor was initially charged to.

Inductors (transformers) store energy in a way that the current through them while they are being "charged" will continue to flow after they are disconnected, which creates a huge voltage.
 
Speakerguy hit it on the head best I think. A capacitor discharged through an ingnition coil is going to provide quiet a burst, but it depends a lot on the series resistance of the primary coil and the super cap itself.
 
Any iron core transformer will saturate when connected to a fully charged 5V 1F capacitor, unless is huge.

I think an air core transformer is best.

Beware, the energy is 12.5J which will is quite likely to be fatal if discharged into the human body in a 100ms or so.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top