🚀 go-pugleaf

     As long as we are on the subject... Xenon/Argon/Neon tubes when
"properly" driven can do some amazing things.  The good ones are
almost indestructable.  (They do evenutally fail by producing Xenon
TriOxide (XeO3) which eats away the electrodes but that takes hundreds
of hours run literally red hot.  (If the bulb only glows red for about
ten seconds after use, you are not overstressing it.)  One project I
worked on took a standard GE flashlamp designed for commercial
photographers (rated at 7 watts average max.) and ran it with a 15KHz
pulsed DC power supply at 2 kilowatts.  Much better (and cheaper) than
photofloods for high-intensity TV studio work.  (Now mostly quartz
halogen.)

     The largest flash lamp I ever put together was around 20 Kjoules
(yes I've seen bigger, but this was my personal record. The capacitor
bank was about four feet square -- Maxwell mylar capacitors 100
microfarad at 4 Kilovolts each.  The pulse from this beast was not
particularly sharp (1/2 intensity width about 1/2 millisecond) but boy
did it light the room.  When we fired it we would (already wearing
protective glasses) turn and face away with our eyes closed.  You
would still get after-images.  At eight feet the light was about 1000
times noon tropical sunlight.  One time the wire to the trigger circut
came loose.  Reattaching it was not an option.  Sneezing in the wrong
direction was not recommended...  (Remember there was 5KV across the
bulb, and anything could cause it to go off, especially removing the
voltage.) We figured how long it would take for the bleed resistor to
get the voltage down to safe levels (below 2KV), locked the lab,
padlocked the lab, put up a big sign "Do not enter before Tuesday,"
and caught up on paperwork.

     This testing resulted in a proposed "lighting system" which would
consist of a motor generator pair, and a triggering circut.  Once the
tube fired it would effectively short the generator and bring it to a
stop.  The idea was to speed up the production of photolithographic
plates (from exposures measured in minutes to fractions of a second).
Loooking at the issues with the then new OSHA convinced us that the
product could never be marketed.  (Note that existing equipment was
just as capable of blinding people if misused, but that this was
"something new.")

--

					Robert I. Eachus

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