Total Circuit Meltdown

[quantum1024]

I have been experimenting with many Tesla circuits lately. I won?t go into my circuit details but, here is what happened to me yesterday. Warning? long story.

I was playing with a circuit that charges batteries (a Tesla type circuit), and I had a couple capacitors of high value connected to the output of my circuit. 220vdc & 200uf. Everything was fine, the batteries where charging, I was reading 150ma into my control circuit at 12vdc. After a couple hours I checked in to see how to circuit was doing, when all of a sudden the capacitors decided to go into meltdown.

There was a high pressure jet of what I assume would have been the dielectric fluid inside the capacitor bursting out the bottom. It was very very fast moving. I was looking at my meters, 13.08vdc on the charging battery and 3ma on my current meter at 12vdc coming in. WEIRD.  So I unplugged a couple jumpers rapidly and ran away. The entire room was filled unfortunately with mist very rapidly. I opened all the doors and windows and waited. When I returned an hour later, I found several of my jumper cables totally and completely melted, completely fried. The batteries where good and fully charged, and my transistor switching system was shot, but everything else was ok..

What I can?t understand is that the capacitors where accelerating the process, in other words, if the current and the voltage where normal, then the capacitors should not have self destructed like this, they should have exploded, or done nothing- but instead they just produced this high pressure jet and it was an accelerating effect.

It?s hard trying to put the pieces of the puzzle back together when something like this occurs. I have asked my self why the current dropped from 150ma to only 3ma. I think that as the failure occurred the transistor outputs where already fried open, this would have left the capacitor closed (shorted), (possibly taking power from the battery!) I checked this afterward, they are not shorted. If the fluid was escaping at such high velocity then surly you would think they would have shorted. 

[Thaelin]

   Need to know the setup.
1. were you using electrolytic caps
2. do you know that the circuit does reverse polarity
3. do you have a fwb on the output to your caps

   If you run a cap forward and backwards long enough, it will break down and do exactly as you described. Its called outgassing. And yes, dont breath it or get it on you. If you will notice on bedini's version there is a fwb on the output so it will always put the correct polarity to the motor or such.
   My setup has a 6700 uf 450v on its out put and has no problem at all, but I do use the fwb.

hope that helps some

thaelin