Design and simulation of Tesla coil as a resonant transformer

Nikola Tesla is the responsible person that invented Tesla Coil, a type of resonant air cored transformer, used to generate high voltage and low current electricity. Even though the Tesla Coil is an old invention, there are useful for developing many devices today. The Tesla Coil is used to conduct innovative experiments in electrical lighting, fluorescence, x-rays, wireless energy transfer for electrical power transmission and also for educational purposes. Tesla coil designs employed high voltage alternating current power source, high voltage capacitor, and a spark gap to excite the primary side of the Tesla coil system with periodic bursts of high frequency current. The primary and secondary coil is designed in order to resonate at the same frequency. Thus, this paper presents to design and simulate the Tesla Coil as resonant transformer using low direct current (dc) voltage as primary input instead of alternating current (ac) voltage and will produce an ac high voltage at secondary circuit side. This project will prove that even though the input is only a low DC voltage, the Tesla Coil will be able to step up the input voltage and simultaneously generate a high voltage approximately 2kV at the secondary side by the simulation.