Nixie tube at 300 000 V

[Tom Van Baak]

I ran across this IN-18 page by Chris Gerekos:
http://www.hazardousphysics.com/main/in18clock/IN-18_Nixie_Tube_Clock_1.html

If you think adding a blue LED glow to a nixie tube is cool, apparently this is how real men do it:
http://www.hazardousphysics.com/misc/Nixie_tube_at_300000V.html

/tvb

[Nicholas Stock]

Nice, thanks for sharing...

Turns out 300,000V is not good for cathode poisoning....who would have known? ;)

Nick

/tvb

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[Nick de Smith]

Some years back when I did a lot of Tesla Coil stuff, one of the standard things to do was light a fluorescent tube just by holding it near the topload.

I kept a bunch of cheap Chinese nixies with the coils for public demos. If you search YouTube for "Cambridge Teslathon" you might find some videos that we did, along with some of our more extreme stuff with thermite :)

Nick

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[Quixotic Nixotic]

Was that the time your friend blew the wall of the car park apart with thermite, Nick? I worry about you sometimes…

John S

[A.J. Franzman]

I followed the link to Chris's theory of operation paragraph, and I believe he is misinformed about where the glow comes from. Sputtering is not necessary for a nixie tube to function; the atoms which become excited and then emit photons as they return to their normal energy state are the gas atoms. In the case of nixie tubes, that is primarily neon, a little bit of argon, and in most tubes, some mercury. Sputtering of the metal is merely an unintended consequence of the electric field and current flow causing some of those gas atoms and ions to collide with the cathodes at high kinetic energy levels. In normal operation of a non-mercury tube, those sputtered atoms do not significantly contribute to the glow discharge. In a tube with mercury, the theory is that the mercury (liquid phase) coats the surface of the cathodes, so when sputtering occurs, it will be mercury atoms that are knocked free. Since mercury (gas phase) is present in the tube, there will then be a state of dynamic equilibrium reached wherein as many mercury atoms rejoin the cathode surface from the gas fill as are being stripped; thus the net result is ideally no cathode erosion and no silvering of the glass.