Everyone likes to play with high voltages, right?. Even though the danger of death goes up with every volt, it’s likely that a few readers will have at some time or other made fancy long sparks. You’re reading this so you lived to tell the tale, and we’d only ever counsel only doing so safely, but the point of this piece lies not in the volts themselves but in a touch of frustration at the voltage generators. There’s a circuit I see so often which annoys me every single time, so here if you don’t mind I’m going to deliver both a little rant and a look into flyback converters.
It’s Got Coils, so It’s A Transformer
Linear power supplies with a mains transformer are a surprisingly rare sight now. Dilshan Jayakody, CC BY-SA 2.0.
How does a transformer work? An alternating current in a primary winding induces an opposite current in its secondary winding. The voltage out is equal to the turns ratio times the voltage in. Thus if you want to make a high voltage, it’s simply a case of finding a transformer with the right turns ratio, and applying the right AC to the input.
A handy choice for a high voltage transformer has been for years a TV line output transformer, also sometimes known as a flyback transformer. You could find these in CRT displays and TVs, and they consist of a square ferrite core with a big chunky high voltage overwinding for the CRT anode circuit and a load of lower vo ..
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