Hi One thing with quartz is that the acoustic Q gets better as the frequency gets lower. If a 5 MHz 5th overtone has a Q of 3M (say), A 1 MHz 5th *could* have a Q of 15M. That assumes you fully scale the package to keep the blank at the same relative size. It also assumes some other effect doesn’t come along and mess with a simple approximation ….. (simple approximations often fall victim to that sort of thing ….). Often the package grows as you discover this or that.
The obvious issue here is that your ~ 22 mm diameter cold weld package is now up around 100 to 150 mm. Nobody seems to want to buy a part that big ….. Which isn’t quite true, sapphire resonators (with a higher Q) do get sold. In order to do an experiment, one would need to grow high quality quartz bar 5X larger than what we have today. It grows at a “some number of mm a month”. You go from a (maybe) 6 month grow process to (maybe) 3 years. The whole autoclave is tied up for that period. You would pay the same total $$$ for one bar or a whole lot of bars. Tooling to accommodate the larger bars likely would also get into the act. Moving to 3 years is only a guess. The process has been “optimized” to deliver good Q at 5 MHz and above. There is no guarantee that this or that “speed” would be adequate for 15M Q. There is a lot of evidence that slower is better. ( = if you use fast quartz in your 5 MHz 5th parts, their performance is poor ). You would be chopping a lot of quartz to do all the work to come up with a “production” ( = useful) design. Having more than one bar probably *is* a good idea. To the extent that Q and ADEV are related, one could expect other useful specs to improve along with the Q. You also might find out that for this size / precision blank, 3 years is “to fast” to get good ADEV …. how would you know that … hmmm .… run another autoclave .... (all that after you had tooled a giant cold weld package /process machine /welder to do your testing in … yikes ….) Fun !! Bob > On Feb 18, 2021, at 10:40 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp <[email protected]> wrote: > > -------- > Bob kb8tq writes: > >> Even if you went with a different material, moving any of the specs listed >> above by 10X would be pretty amazing. > > That was the answer I expected :-) > > What about geometry ? > > Would things like whispering gallery improve things if we found a reasonable > way to produce them ? > > -- > Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 > [email protected] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 > FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe > Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to http://lists.febo.com/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts_lists.febo.com and follow the instructions there.
