Bob, if each drop requires 100 joules of energy to vaporize then Mills will need 100 kilowatts of power when 1000 shots per second is the cycle rate. That amount of drive would seriously impact the COP figure that he is achieving. Do you recall any mention of the number of joules required to ionize the silver drops? My gut feeling is that 100 joules would be on the low side of that requirement but I have not performed the calculation so far. Perhaps someone has done the math and would like to offer their data.
If we assume 100 joules of energy per pulse then we can calculate the amount of delta voltage required from the capacitor. I looked up the part number and find it is 3400 Farads. If the initial voltage is assumed to be 5 volts across the series/parallel combination then the drop becomes 6 millivolts per shot. This is quite low and thus the current supplied from the solar cell system would appear to be relatively constant during the device operation. Since the capacitors are not actually discharged to a significant degree I would be surprised if their life expectancy is comparable to what is seen for complete discharge and recharge. Do we see any evidence for the amount of power required from the DC source that is currently powering the experiment? I doubt that it can supply a steady 100 thousand watts at 5 volts, which would be 20000 amps of DC. This requirement suggests that my original estimate of 100 joules per shot must be too high by a factor of 10 or instead, the actual firing rate is 100 shots per second or less. Perhaps Mills intentionally failed to discuss the DC input power requirement in order to avoid the contradictions that exist. Or, the device demonstrated is not capable of the power rating that they believe will eventually become possible with a significant amount of engineering. Would you like to add to my speculations? Dave -----Original Message----- From: Bob Higgins <[email protected]> To: vortex-l <[email protected]> Sent: Sun, Feb 7, 2016 11:11 am Subject: Re: [Vo]: BLP demo video Sorry, I mis-counted my divisions ... the supercaps would expire after 16.7 MINUTES - they are only rated for 1M discharges, so at 1000/sec, you get 1000sec or 16.7 minutes. On Sun, Feb 7, 2016 at 8:45 AM, Bob Higgins <[email protected]> wrote: One of the things I noticed in Mills' apparatus is his use of supercaps - in this case Maxwell P285 supercaps. Supercaps sound great until you dig into the details. Supercaps are somewhere between a battery and a capacitor in specifications. One of the core specifications that is a problem for repeated discharges is the rated number of charge-discharge cycles. These supercaps are rated for 1M charge-discharge cycles (lifetime), which sounds like a lot compared to a battery. However, if you were doing as Mills describes and operating at 1000 pulses/second, these supercaps are going to expire after 16.7 hours of operation. This is a fundamental characteristic of supercaps, and makes them an unfit component for use in a power system. Such critical components should be rated for a minimum of 10k hours of typical operation to create a reliable system. This will be a painful engineering problem to overcome, but not insurmountable. They may just have to use a huge bank of conventional capacitors.
