Reactive power - Reactive Generator research from GotoLuc - discussion thread

[Farmhand]

Engineers care about apparent power, because even though the current associated with reactive power does no work at the load, it heats the wires, wasting energy. Conductors, transformers and generators must be sized to carry the total current, not just the current that does useful work.

The above statement makes no sense to me,and seems to be an oxymoron.
Quote:Engineers care about apparent power, because even though the current associated with reactive power does no work at the load, it heats the wires, wasting energy.

Is not heating wires doing work,in the form of creating heat?.This is reactive power doing useful work as far as im concerned.

That's kinda debatable, Some of the reactive power returning to the supply is converted to real power and dissipated as heat in the wires. No one I know of wants the wires hot, so the work is unwanted and not useful. The only useful work is work done on/by or whatever in the intended load we are powering like a motor or a light ect.. Although some people might want to risk heating their house with "reactive power related losses", I'm sure I wouldn't, the less active power in the house wiring the better in my opinion.

Just sayin it depends how it's read and how we chose to think about it. I'm all for experiments. Going by the complexities of accurately measuring AC power in such systems I personally in my own experiments would want to see some other form of verifying things. Not saying using the scope is not good. Proof is in the pudding, and no one can deny when lots of work gets seen to be done obviously over and above the input.

I've got my scope out practicing and familiarizing myself more with it in fact, though I'm not so sure mine will give much useful Math calculations. I'll try on something simple first and see what I can calculate and see if the scope will do the same.

I did check a while back my true RMS meter against the scope and they seemed very close, so with a good battery some DMM's can be quite accurate.

Cheers

[tinman]

OK, I checked the screen on the video and it does not indicate AC coupling by the usual squiggle. Very tricky; there doesn't seem to be any way to tell the channel coupling except by going into the setup menu, where we can see that Luc has AC coupling set on both channels. The coupling isn't indicated on the normal scopeshot apparently. That's a "gotcha" that means one needs to be very careful using that particular scope model. As we can see, your higher-end Tek scope indicates clearly the coupling with the sine wave squiggle.

The coupling issue has come up before. Many people seem to think that you need to use AC coupling to measure an AC signal, but as we now know, that's not what it's for at all. Looking at how the scope accomplishes the miracle of AC coupling might help one to understand just what it does and how it's used. AC coupling merely switches in a capacitor in series with the probe input lead, blocking the DC component of any input signal and only letting the AC component pass to the scope's input.

Well it looks like i have made the same mistake. I asumed that as we are measureing AC then it should be set to AC coupling-now i have learned something new. As you can see in my last scope shot's,i have the ac wave next to the ch1 ch2 indicator(bottom right hand corner). So now to go change scope to DC coupling,and start over lol.
Realy wish i could get this math crap worked out on my scope.

[tinman]

Below is a picture of the circuit i am testing ATM.The picture represents 1/2 cycle,so as to make it clear what i ment by the FWBR being hooked to the high side of one tank,and the low side of the other tank.

[poynt99]

Realy wish i could get this math crap worked out on my scope.

I thought you had it sorted some time ago?

[DilJalaay]

Function AC / DC coupling Controller in Oscilloscope