Category Archives: Chapter 3 – Atoms and Radioactvity

One of my all-time favorite circuits is the the following DC-to-AC inverter (click diagram to enlarge) based on an old color TV flyback:

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Our two prior posts show how to build very high voltage power supplies using flybacks from old color TVs.  The advantage of the method we use is that any flyback can be driven, regardless of how its primary is wired.  This is because we wind our own primary using litz wire. Continue reading→

We use the flyback-driver circuit shown in our d.i.y. 250 kV DC power supply in many other of our setups, so we built a stand-alone universal resonant transformer driver.  Continue reading→

High voltage DC power supplies are used by science enthusiasts for powering electron tubes and x-ray tubes, charging high-voltage capacitors, powering electrostatic “levitators”, etc.  Many of these power supplies use a flyback transformer to produce high voltage at high frequency (AC), followed by a “Cockroft-Walton Multiplier” to rectify and dramatically increase the voltage.

The Cockroft-Walton multiplier uses a cascaded series of diodes and capacitors to generate a high voltage DC potential from an AC input through a circuit topology that uses diodes to charge capacitors in parallel and discharge them in series.  The output polarity of the Cockroft-Walton multiplier depends on the way in which its diodes are oriented, so the output polarity (referenced to ground) of a high-voltage DC power supply is usually set during the design.

However, since some of our physics experiments require one or the other polarity, we build our Cockroft-Walton multipliers with an extra capacitor so that we can make our HV power supplies output either positive or negative high voltage referenced to ground.  Continue reading→