My elementary school had its first annual science fair a few weeks ago, so me and my friend signed up and we decided to do it on wireless electricity. So naturally, we built a tesla coil. It took a couple of tries, but we eventually got it to barely illuminate a portion of a fluorescent light bulb. We somehow managed to make it to the regional competition, but we need to make it at least power the full lightbulb. The lightbulb only blinks when the spark gap flashes, which is every 1-2 seconds.We used an HV transformer from a bug zapper which had 2 HV input and 2 HV output wires. The 2 input wires were attached to a 9V battery and the output wires were attached to each end of a capacitor bank comprised of 2 150k capacitors. We used 18 AWG speaker wire to connect the capacitors to the spark gap and primary coil.The secondary coil was made of 24 AWG magnetized copper wire wrapped around a 20cm long piece of 1 1/4' PVC pipe, while the primary coil was made from 10 AWG wire wrapped ~6 times around the secondary.The coil seems to only power fluorescent lights (we tried 2 incandescent and 2 LEDs). We used these 2 videos as guides during the building process, they were fairly easy to understand.
https://youtu.be/zbV1zyg_4qU
https://youtu.be/X_em8y_7oAU
Any suggestions on how we can improve the coil? The regional competition is on March 28th.Picture ---> https://postimg.cc/sMHVzjG8
