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Originally Posted by WISCOJIM
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Is the pulse a steady train of pulses on a one-shot deal?
Philips made a pulse tester good for about 2Kv and up to 60Khz - I used to play with one, connecting 1600V rated TV safety caps at 1200V, with a 9.9 Khz pulse rate, the highest rate above 1Kv. Cheap (read: non-Sprague) safety caps would get warm after a few minutes. At 900V and 15.8 Khz (closest i could get to 15,750...), none of the caps would get warm...
For fun, we'd flash burn foil gum wrappers with the Philips - one pulse at 2KV, and you had a wisp of smoke, and a carbon trail across the foil. I'd love to have had a high-speed camera to film it - you could see the foil buckle as the pulse traveled across it - most likely from the heat.
We used it to pulse test HV cables for airborne fire-control radar pulse-forming networks....I can remember that all the cables I ever tested passed. But sea-level testing proved little - get that cable in an unpressurized aircraft bay, and at altitude, it was a different animal. Arcs, blow outs (where the center conductor burned a trail to the outer jacket) and opens occurred. Hard to do real-world testing. A failed cable showed itself easily - no testing required...