Solid State Tesla Coil (SSTC) Part 1

2021-07-11

[public] 35.7K views, 832 likes, dislikes audio only

This is the first part in series where I'm going to try to build a solid state tesla coil (SSTC) without any prior experience in doing so.

In this video i start off driving a tesla coil with a ZVS oscillator circuit connected to the primary, which doesn't work very well because there's no ability to adjust the frequency (aside from sliding a contact along the primary coil) and driving at resonance is unstable because the ZVS circuit will want to "drift off" when it sees the huge load that occurs at resonance.

The second, somewhat more successful circuit used a 555 timer to drive a single MOSFET on/off to oscillate the primary at resonance. This allowed me to dial in the resonant frequency with trimmer knobs, but it was easy to overshoot it, and i killed several MOSFETs in the process.

The FET I'm using for all these videos is an IRF250, and the videos shown are mostly with 12V of input, although in some of the clips there's 30V in. I use a PNP-NPN pair as a push-pull driver for the gate, but since these aren't moving more than about 200 mA, i think the gate isn't being driven hard enough, which is causing huge switching losses.

In the next video, I'm going to cover the proper procedure for tuning a tesla coil with an oscilloscope, driving the primary coil using feedback signals from the secondary coil, and techniques to avoid obliterating my MOSFETs.

Music Used:

Heatley Bros. - 8 Bit Go

Serge Pavkin - Fractal

Serge Pavkin - Tech