Quote:
Originally Posted by nigelr2000
... I wonder how accurate it would be ...
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I wouldn't trust it to better than +/-10-20%.
In a previous life I used kilovolt (and indeed megavolt) spark gaps in the high-power laser equipment I worked with. Some of the gaps were DC-charged, as this one would be, but most were pulse-charged. Counter-intuitively perhaps, the pulse-charged ones were a good deal more reliable than the DC-charged ones (but whenever we possibly could, we tried to trigger all of them).
Things which can cause DC-charged gaps to 'go early' include: changes in air pressure and humidity, contamination and damage (even at very small scale) on the electrode surfaces, surface tracking on the gap's insulator (it makes UV light which photoionises the gas in the gap), cosmic rays (gas breakdown is used in the 'spark chamber' detector e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvvW9chTxH4) etc, etc.
Cheers,
GJ