Testing the TK Tar Baby

[MileHigh]

Deck chairs on the Titanic.  lol

[TinselKoala]

I've made a video showing the Tar Baby cooking Turnip Stew.

It's uploading now. I think I manage to make a couple of important points, even if it is kind of long.

I'm not saying that the NERDs used this mode purposefully but the SCRN0243 sure looks a lot like the traces I've obtained here. Bear in mind that 0243 was made with a 72 volt battery pack and I am using 48 volts.

Image shows load temperature just after I finished shooting the video. It rose up to 110 plus before I stopped the run to let it cool a bit. Then I turned it back on, what the heck ... just checked, it is at 141.7 degrees C right now. Q1 is too hot to touch for more than a second or two but still seems stable.

[polln8r]

TK, is your observatory all set up for this evening's moon-shadow?

[TinselKoala]

So if my resistor stack is hot enough to heat 250 mL of mineral oil to 150 degrees C in just a few minutes.... after "upping the oscillation frequency" or twiddling some other knob  ... I wonder how hot it would be if I just attached a thermocouple to it and measured it in air.

And THEN plunged it into some water.

Do you think I would get some tiny bubbles then?

Now Ainslie claims to have "taken water to boil". Note the very careful construction of the phrase. If she boiled water, why didn't she just say so? And of course the description of the event on the day of the event says in her own words that the water wasn't actually boiling.

But I've heated a known quantity of mineral oil to 150 degrees C. Would my resistors have boiled some water in this experiment? The specific heat of mineral oil is 1.67 and the density is 0.83 or so. How much water could I have raised to 100 C I wonder?
How about if I heated them in air and then when they couldn't get any hotter, I plunged them into some room-temperature water. Would I see some tiny little bubbles?

[TinselKoala]

TK, is your observatory all set up for this evening's moon-shadow?

Unfortunately I am too far south for the annular path, and the sky is cloudy anyway. I might be able to detect a bit of dimming from the partial, but I don't think that I can even see the sun when it's that low; I'd have to take the scope and mount somewhere flat and unobstructed.

So.... no, I think I'll just watch it on the internest.