I've picked-up a few "war-wounds" over the years..... My favorite inductor story is about a 3-phase converter I built in college to run some BIG computer equipment I bought in 1983, notably vacuum-column tape drives. After a few failures (SCR-based design, rotating motor-armature) I went to big NPN power darlingtons (400V MOSFETs were expensive, and 1000V NPNs were readily available).
So I got the thing running, loaded-up a tape, and was delighted to see it going forward, backward, and very-fast rewind. I needed to know what would happen if SoCal Edison had a surprise blackout, so I yanked the power and KABOOM! . One of the transistors exploded because it had a direct-short across a 340V supply, with 30,000uF of capacitors. The energy stored in 10 inches of wire destroyed a second transistor. The 3rd one survived. On Tuesday, October 27, 2020 at 11:33:34 AM UTC-7 [email protected] wrote: > Obviously you guys are veterans ;) > > > On Tuesday, October 27, 2020 at 10:07:47 AM UTC-7 gregebert wrote: > >> Inductance is one of those things where you have a hard time dealing with >> it when you dont want it, and when you *do* want it, it doesn't always work >> as expected due to saturation and other losses. >> On top of that, it's difficult to model all of the aspects of coupled >> inductors (transformers) in SPICE simulations, so you always end up doing a >> lot of bench work getting these things to work correctly. >> >> Every project I've worked on using inductors in power applications works >> great at low/zero load, and gets challenging trying to get it up to full >> load. >> >> On Tuesday, October 27, 2020 at 7:20:24 AM UTC-7 Robert G. Schaffrath >> wrote: >> >>> I always found inductors to be the bane of electronics projects. >>> Resistors, capacitors and other discrete components were always readily >>> available in standard values but inductors were that odd item that you >>> often wound up having wind yourself on a core that itself was difficult to >>> obtain. Something along the lines of "wind 10 turns of #18 Teflon coated >>> wire on an Acme T128 core, spacing the turns 2mm apart" or something just >>> as annoying. >>> >>> Back in the early 1980's my Electrical Engineering class took a field >>> trip to the Ferroxcube plant in Saugerties, NY to see how inductors were >>> made. It was fascinating to watch and they were of course very >>> pro-inductor. Their catalog had a wide variety of components. But they were >>> definitely an item you could not easily buy in single quantities off the >>> shelf from RadioShack or other vendors of that era. >>> >>> On Monday, October 26, 2020 at 7:20:39 PM UTC-4 gregebert wrote: >>> >>>> Theoretically, there's no reason why switched capacitors cant be used >>>> instead of inductors for voltage multiplication. Charge-pumps were used on >>>> a lot of IC's back in the 1980's before everything went to CMOS, notably >>>> DRAMs, that operated from a single supply-voltage. Some of you may >>>> remember >>>> the 4116 had three supply voltages, but the next-generation 4164 was >>>> 5V-only. Those were exciting times when DRAMs went from 16Kx1 to >>>> 64Kx1....... >>>> >>>> Boosting 12V to 200V for a nixie supply without an inductor is >>>> certainly possible, but it's not very practical. >>>> >>>> On Monday, October 26, 2020 at 2:12:48 PM UTC-7 Dekatron42 wrote: >>>> >>>>> Soon you might not see them anymore: >>>>> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02721-7 , just kidding - >>>>> it will require some more breakthroughs before they have a practical >>>>> component, but it would be nice if they could get smaller...... >>>>> >>>>> /Martin >>>>> >>>>> On Monday, 26 October 2020 15:35:36 UTC+1, Paul Andrews wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>> Yep. Its all about the transformer, until it isn't. That's the >>>>>> hardest part about rolling your own power supply. >>>>>> >>>>>> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/4b595101-f4bc-4e25-9514-9463bfc973dan%40googlegroups.com.
