Huge High voltage PSU
Because sometimes, a bigger hammer is better.
The design is based on a rather large step up transformer giving about 2kV when driven from 240V. The transformer was original to the case in its earlier incarnation but since 2kV is rather low for my projects I rebuilt the whole thing with an integrated voltage dubbeler. The completed unit is powered through a 10amp varac power regulator (not shown here) to prevent neighbourhood brownouts.
This beast can output up to 5Kv at about an amp. Thats 5Kw of high voltage power :)
The front panel. The fogging on the voltage dial was caused by the superglue used to repair a crack. All in all its a bit messy looking, but does the job. Most of the lights you see on the front are to fill up holes that weren’t needed.
Some innards. On the left are the power factor corection capactors, to make the very inductive load of the transformer appear more resistave to the mains supply, without these bad things happen under heavy loads. In the middle is the transformer, the green cilinders on the right are power resistors to tame the output a little. High voltage rectifier strip is to the right of the resistors, composed of some fairly beefy 6A diodes. The big green resistors are very deffanatly necessary, I blew up many diodes with this thing especially at power-on. Probably due to inrush current into the doubler. The diodes used here are rated at 6A, 1200 V and are rather expensive (for diodes anyway) there is also another strip of brown resistors to the right of the rectifier, these are the voltage devider for the voltage despaay at the front. The yellow capacitors at the back are part of the voltage doubler, rated at 2uf 2.5kv each if memory serves correctly
A better view of the rectifier. little resistors across the diodes are to even out the voltage potential, very necessary in high voltage diode chains. If this was a high frequency inverter the diodes would need little capacitors across them as well, but at 50 Hz mains that is not necessary
