Jeff Fink wrote: > In all the written info from the Correas, I never saw a mention of whether > they were going for a forward pulse or a reverse pulse or both. With all > due respect to Mike, the Correas never proved that OU performance cannot be > done with a proper capacitor circuit.
In the Correa circuit, the energy generated in the cell is full wave rectified and dumped into a capacitor shunted by a battery pack. A PAGD pulse may contain 100 joules at several hundred volts. What *must not happen* is that the terminal voltage of the cell rise during the PAGD pulse, for that will quench it. Nor can you trigger it. It is not that a capacitor bank won't work, it just has to be ***very large***. Much larger than Jeff tried. Your idea of using a pulse > transformer to get reasonable voltages may have merrit, but I suspect that > the accompanying inductive reactance may be counterproductive. Large > capacitors like 5600mfd @350vdc are $60 to $75 ea. So , get ready to spend a > little money. That's 0.0056 farad. Q = CV, 1 joule will charge it to 178 volts and 100 joules to 17,800 volts. To prevent the terminal voltage from rising to, say 100 volts, 100 farads of capactors would be needed, or 17,857 capcitors. By comparison, batteries look pretty good. > > You will also need ballast resistors ranging from 100 to 5000 ohm in order > to see the full range of the phenomena. The 100 ohm will need to be 250 > watt min. > > In general I found that the rate of PAGD events is controlled by the ballast > resistor value and the intensity of the event is controlled by capacitance > across the tube. You absolutely do not use a capacitance across the tube. What you have built is a gas-discharge relaxation oscillator equivalent to any common strobe flash. It is ***not*** a PAGD reactor. This parallel capacitance cannot be electrolytic ( > electrolytics burn up) and must be relatively small. I have tried values > from 1 to 88 mfd. I call this capacitor the initiator. The Correas do not > use this circuit element. For very good reason. Jeff has "known better" and not duplicated what the Correas used. > > While capturing rapid fire pulses with my caps and light bulbs did not show > any sign of over unity, I did do some single pulse experiments two years ago > that at first looked promising. You have not duplicated what the Correas did on several important points. The circuit looks 'odd' but that is what they say works. > > I was set up to capture a forward pulse with a 3mfd initiator cap and a > fairly high ballast resistor. I noted the voltage on the filter caps of my > power supply and then switched off the 110vac. I then powered up the > circuit. A moment later I would get a single PAGD event and then I would > immediately shut off the circuit and read the voltage increase of the pulse > capture cap, and then read the voltage loss of the power supply filter caps. > I then did energy gain/loss calculations and often found the energy gain of > the capture cap to be more than the energy loss of the power supply filter > caps by as much as 11%. This didn't really prove anything since these > results were within the capacitance tolerances of the caps. But, like I > said, these positive results did not hold up during rapid fire operation. > > I firmly believe that Paulo Correa is a truly brilliant person. He has > called me a buffoon. Perhaps he is correct in that judgement. But, I like > to think that what I lack in genius I make up for in common sense. Jeff, common sense can be misleading when dealing with something "new". When I approached the Correas to write about PAGD, I did so as a student, without preconceptions as to what is or is not "common sense". I assumed they had discovered a truly new phenomenon that did not necessarily obey any ordinary rules, and that they had empirically worked out how to evoke it and control it. After all, here is a simple tube in which 100 joule flashes of energy appear spontaneously when the proper conditions are provided. Where in all of conventional science and "common sense" is there precedence for this? Mike Carrell
