Jayson’s Status Report for 4/18/2026

This week I participated in full system testing in the lab where we successfully generated small arcs to a conducting metal surface, confirming that the system can transfer enough energy through the coils to ionize air. During testing, we identified a major issue — the secondary coil’s self-capacitance was too low, pushing its resonant frequency to approximately 3.54MHz, nearly double the design target of ~1.834MHz. This mismatch meant the primary and secondary could not efficiently couple energy. The fix was installing a much larger topload on the secondary to add capacitance, which brought the resonant frequency down to approximately 1.48MHz. The primary coil was also adjusted from 6.9 to 7.75 turns to increase its inductance and lower its resonant frequency to better match the secondary’s new value. I assisted with diagnosing and evaluating these changes throughout the week. The coil assembly is now mounted on the housing lid and Caleb is printing the final enclosure piece. The team is meeting Sunday for final testing ahead of the Wednesday interim demo, where the goal is to achieve stable free-air arcs with audio modulation.