Joule Thief 101

[MileHigh]

Yes, Magneticttist, if you want to get more out of your hobby, you should learn how an inductor actually works.

As far as your tirade goes, here is what your buddy Brad had to say to me when I gave him a bare-bones answer to the question (which he forced me to state BTW so I said what the question was in order to get him off my back) in the form of a formula:

You are the epic failure others claim you to be.
You are a total disaster
Your (sic) a fraud.
You epic failure.
You are now the laughing stock of this forum.

Isn't that nice?

[Magneticitist]

Yes, Magneticttist, if you want to get more out of your hobby, you should learn how an inductor actually works.

As far as your tirade goes, here is what your buddy Brad had to say to me when I gave him a bare-bones answer to the question (which he forced me to state BTW so I said what the question was in order to get him off my back) in the form of a formula:

You are the epic failure others claim you to be.
You are a total disaster
Your (sic) a fraud.
You epic failure.
You are now the laughing stock of this forum.

Isn't that nice?

Ok, well all that aside, this was the meat of our argument this time, and any time in the past regarding inductors.. You claim I and others need to learn how an inductor "actually works" to make better use of our time.. Well yes sir, I am in total agreement. That seems to have been the goal from day one realizing inductors are the mystery foundation of what I and a lot of us play with mostly.
However it seems you follow that statement by talking about ideal inductors and ideal voltages etc.. That does not seem to convey how an inductor "actually works". That seems to convey how an imaginary scenario plays out when our inductor possesses characteristics less likely to find than actual overunity in a circuit you critique.

This is why my argument is usually along the lines of - well crap man.. since we clearly don't even understand this ideal lesson, and it doesn't actually have anything to do with anything inductors actually do in the real world, what help is it really to this conversation? Even if I were to be in total agreement and understanding with you about your ideal coil question, I don't think that would bring me anywhere closer to understanding what may actually be going on in Brad's joule thief, for example. If that was your attempt at a clarification of what's going on in the real world inductor in that joule thief, then I must resign to the understanding that I'm simply too much of an idiotic buffoon to even comprehend it in any other manner since the lesson you have already given is among the most elementary of EE basics. In which case, maybe you're right, brainstorming with the actual physical creator and demonstrator of that device may be a better journey.

[Magneticitist]

You know, more importantly MH... I want to ask you something important..

Do you believe Overunity is possible? If not, I'm not going to make some cheap statement about how you don't belong browsing overunity.com then.. but if not, do you genuinely wish to help others possibly achieve what you believe to be impossible, or do you genuinely wish to dissuade others from attempting what you believe to be a fruitless journey in the long run?

I'm always wondering what personal tinkerings those with the high level of knowledge such as yourself are doing in their personal time.. and no this is not some sneaky jab at you somehow having no actual experience in comparison to someone such as Brad being that he has 'things to show' and you have 'things to speak'. That would imply you are incapable.. however I would rather assume you avoid the effort altogether mostly because you have insofar been unable to mathematically work out a viable option in the first place, so why build a failure, or some simple device that revolutionizes nothing? I am genuinely curious.. what route would you take?
how would you relate your understanding of how inductors work using analogies such as the ideal coil situation to create what would be a device that is over 100% electrically efficient?

[MileHigh]

You're a thinking man so let me run a few things by you.

Suppose for the simple question the inductor was not an ideal inductor of 5 Henrys.  Let's discuss variations 2.X of the question/experiment.  Supposing it was a real inductor that was 50 milli-Henrys made from a big coil of very thick copper wire where the wire resistance was two milli-ohms.  That gives a Tau of 25 seconds.  Instead of the ideal voltage source outputting a 4-volt pulse for 3 seconds, let's change that to a 0.4 volt pulse for 0.3 seconds.  Let's call that version 2.0 of the question/experiment.

Now, when running experiment version 2.0, is there any real difference between a 50 milli-Henry coil with a two milli-ohm resistance and running experiment version 2.1 with a 50 milli-Henry ideal coil?

When you look at the actual results of experiment 2.0 and compare them with experiment 2.1 are you go going to see any significant differences in the results?

The answer is NO, you will not see any major differences.  So why are you, and Brad and others always moaning and complaining when somebody talks about an ideal coil?  It is in reality very EASY to run experiments where the wire resistance of the coil can be ignored, primarily by ensuring that your experiment runs under certain timing constraints.

I will repeat it to you again:  You can run experiments where your real-world coil is for all practical intents and purposes indistinguishable from an ideal coil.

So what's the problem?  What's wrong with talking about ideal coils when they can perform almost identically to real coils?

Then there is a final ironic twist that you probably will not get, but the fact is discussing tests or experiments with ideal coils is generally SIMPLER.  You don't have to worry about the "hassle" of the series resistance of the wire.

Discussing ideal coils is 100% valid and applies directly to the real world.

And the pause for thought is that here we are discussing a very very simple question/experiment and people are totally stumped.

[MileHigh]

Now I am going to address the moaning and groaning about the ideal voltage source.  People say, "There is no such thing as an ideal voltage source."  Or sometimes people have "stuck preconceptions" in their heads, like Brad says, "An ideal voltage source must be a fixed value."  Fixed value my ass.

Are you by any chance a car audio buff?  You can buy something like a 2x800-watt stereo amplifier for your car.  You can get those giant supercapacitors to make sure you can supply the peak currents to your big woofers and sub-woofers.

I have news for you.  Those are just big beefy negative-feedback MOSFET-based servo voltage amplifiers.  They are giant operational amplifiers.

Within certain bandwidth limits, and certain IV limits (800 watts is nothing to sneeze at) those car audio amplifiers ARE ideal voltage sources.

And on top of that, they are ideal voltage sources that are NOT limited to a fixed voltage.  They can be an ideal voltage source that outputs Ozzy Osbourne or the Star Spangled Banner.

What's the moral of the story?   You can connect your super-duper car audio amplifier acting as an ideal voltage source to version 2.0 of the experiment and replicate it in real life.

So you have an ideal voltage source driving a coil that is very very close to an ideal coil and make measurements.

But you know what's even better than that?  Use your brain and do the experiment right here on this forum without even having to build it.

You are supposed to know what will happen with the super-duper car audio amplifier acting as an ideal voltage source driving version 2.0 of the experiment before you even build it.  That's the difference between a true experimenter and just being a Joe Blow and building pulse motors year after year and passively observing the scope traces and measuring the RPM.

That is kind of the essence of this discussion that I didn't even really want to get into.  You guys can play with coils until you are blue in the face without understanding how they actually work.  That is being made pretty clear with the resurrection of this very simple question/thought experiment.  So you guys can discuss it and brainstorm and do the work to educate yourselves so that all of your future experiments are better and more rewarding because you have more insight into what is going on, or you can keep on doing what you are doing.