Terry Blanton wrote:
Meanwhile, I contemplate how to reduce inductance. Do I cool the coil and jack the voltage or do I reconstruct it with silver and gold plated conductors? Milliseconds seem to matter.
Do you mean reduce resistance? (Inductance certainly won't be affected by cooling the coil, so I'd guess you meant to say resistance.)
Anyhow I will go ahead and stick my foot in and you can ignore these comments as you see fit...
Silver plating won't help a whole lot unless the frequency's high enough for skin effect to play a big role. For low frequencies you would want to use solid silver wire. For motors operating at reasonably normal speeds I wouldn't think you'd care about skin effect. At "millisecond" speeds, as you say, I don't think skin effect is usually a major issue.
For really HF, on the other hand, you don't want to use silver plating because it tarnishes; I believe the "gold standard" is palladium plating on silver for super HF stuff.
IIRC gold is no great shakes in the conductivity department; it's used in connectors because it won't tarnish. Again, that might be a win for very HF work where you really care whether there's a semiconductive surface film of crud or not, but for low frequency work I suspect you're better off with plain copper than gold (but I didn't look this up and I could be all wet here). OTOH gold plating is presumably a lot cheaper than palladium plating if skin effect is a problem.
Words to the wise. Terry
