[Johnson] Slightly off topic question concerning mercury vapor rectifiers

[Glen Zook]

You definitely need to let the filaments in mercury
vapor rectifiers warm up for a couple of minutes
before applying HV if at all possible.

It might be possible that operating the tube on its
side may have caused your problems.  Try putting the
power supply back in the normal position and letting
the MV tubes "cook" a couple of hours with just the
filaments.  That might "fix" your problems with those
particular tubes.

Remember that with solid-state equivalents that the HV
will be a fair bit higher than with the tubes. 
However, removing the filament connection from the
transformer will help considerably with the life of
the transformer (if the filaments are being supplied
by anything except their own supply) by removing the
rectified B+ from it.

Glen, K9STH


--- Joe Yamond <bbc39668@yahoo.com> wrote:

the supply uses 2 816 MVR tubes and I had heard that
these tube filiments need to warm up completely before
the high voltage is turned on. Is there any truth to
this?

Also during testing the tubes were horizontal could
this have caused them to fail? 

=====
Glen, K9STH

Web sites

http://home.attbi.com/~k9sth
http://home.attbi.com/~zcomco

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