Improvements to Secondary Windings of Tesla Transformers

Impulse excitation of the tuned primary circuit of a Tesla transformer generates a voltage and current response in the similarly tuned secondary circuit that contains both a fundamental component and a series of multiple higher-order modes. This paper investigates the most significant of these modes, in order to demonstrate a design approach that, when applied to the secondary winding, can bring about a reduction in the higher-order modes without significantly affecting the fundamental term. The resulting process leads to an improved spectral purity of the transformer output, making it better suited than existing conventional designs for application in electronic warfare and other high-power systems.