Power Supply

In order to create the high voltages required to energize the inner grid, a special power supply was needed. As commercial kV power supplies are very expensive, I decided to build my own. This supply is comprised of a variac tied to the main transformer which is output through a reverse full-wave bridge rectifier and then through a filter capacitor. Because the voltages were too high to measure with a regular multimeter, I made a voltage divider circuit to cut the voltage down enough to measure it. Unfortunately, the first time I measured the voltage, I failed to take into account the fact that the internal impedance of the meter was the same as the resistor I was measuring over, so my calculated results were wrong. However, once I factored in the internal impedance of the meter, I was able to (correctly) measure a maximum output voltage of about 20kV. I also measured a no-load maximum current of 30 mA. Finally, I measured the output using an oscilloscope. There was an appreciable ripple, so I might build more smoothing circuitry for future generations of the power supply.