Science/Engineering/Technical forums

That time of year again and time to brush the cupboard - the picture shows 20kv 24mfd caps repainted (@ $300+ ) the blue showing rust and the red after sand blasting and two coats of undercoat and a red finish gloss.
The caps weigh in at over 200lbs each.

Wow, that's some Joules! I have 3 Maxwell 120 uf/10kV here, and yup, they're big and heavy. A little scary, I've seen what you can do with a few K joules. Those look like a little more series L and R than the coaxial Maxwells, which should make them a good bit easier to deal with that way. The Maxwells will *destroy* 8 pieces of parallel RG-8 with peak currents -- the braid explodes right off them, and I've had to have it picked out of my hide! I was lucky to be facing away at the time, so I still have my eyes. Do be careful!

That looks like a nice setup to play with Dense Plasma Focus fusion, if you're so inclined. You can pretty much design the rods to match whatever caps you have and the discharge is on the slow side without the enormous (multiple hundreds of kilo-amps) peak currents needed to make it work well.
My Maxwell's are only 10kv, a bit on the low side for that, and due to the coaxial construction, hard to hook in series -- a whole can would have to float off ground, not something that I'd like to do.

Nice job on the restoration!

The thing is that one needs a different level of engineering Doug to get the transfer of energy fast and it also needs a few tricks.