Meyer's Resonant Charging Circuit Analysed

[Farrah Day]

Hi guys, it has probably occurred to some of you that we're not all 'reading from the same page', which won't help our cause. 

This is mainly due, no doubt, to our different individual levels of knowledge and understanding, particularly with reference to electronics, but also partly due to those with no obvious electronics background simply plucking ideas and formulae out of cyberspace. It would be good for at least some of us to agree on some issues.

Oystla stated:

Your statement
"Now, irrespective of what Meyer states, I don't believe this cct can charge up a capacitor to more than twice the supply voltage."

is again fundamentally wrong.

An LC series circuit can produce dangerously high voltage.

An example can be found at;

http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_2/chpt_6/3.html

This is an example of what I mean.  Oystla claims I'm fundamentally wrong... but I'm not.  Oystla, you've overlooked something in your haste to prove me wrong.  Look again and you will find that the cct shown via your link does not contain the crucial 'diode' that you fussed about being a capacitor in an earlier post... remember?

With the diode in place, this cct can only double the supply voltage... I'm not wrong about this, whether you accept it or not. Google some more!

I make no bones about the fact that I'm uncertain as to what exactly is happening at the wfc electrodes, but I'm quite certain that my electronics theory is far superior to yours. 

Garfield, I beg to differ about the 'dc resonant series charging cct', but I really don't want to get into a 'heated' debate about this - hey, it's Christmas!

Just check out Tesla coils and you will find this cct used to fire them. It is simply a 'series resonant charging cct' with a blocking diode added.

Without the diode, as Oystla, so keenly pointed out, the voltage across the capacitor can reach very high values, but this is with an ac signal.  With an ac signal this cct does properly resonate.  Incorporating the diode stops the cct resonating, because the current can't reverse, so again is a bit of a misnomer. But nevertheless, the cct does really exist.

Apart from not resonating, the cct with the diode will also not allow the capacitor to discharge through the inductor as the pulses are always only now +ve.  It is often used to fire Tesla coils in preference to a the series resonant charging cct without the diode, because the capacitor does not fully dischage during each firing. This means that the firing point is not so critical as the capacitor is always charged to some level.

Another thing that we have to consider when trying to apply reactance and frequency formulae to our cct, is that you will find that various waveforms depicted are usually assuming a sinewave signal.  We are using a square wave pulses.  Quite a bit of difference in how this affects the charging cycles.  Unlike a sinewave that has a relatively slowly rising voltage, a square wave is 'near' instant.  All these things need to be taken into consideration - you can't simply apply standard ac resonant LC cct theory to pulsed dc.

Garfield, the other important point of course is that if our wfc becomes a good capacitor through conditioning, then it is an electrolytic capacitor, which of course would be destroyed by ac.  So then the diode becomes important in maintaining the correct polarity across our wfc. 

I think this subject is really fascinating and I'm keen to do further experiments.

[oystla]

OK, then we can agree that we disagree.

Can anyone connect an oscilloscope and check this out.

Have a merry Christmas & happy new year. I'm logged off until new year...

[Garfield]

Yes I think Oystla is right in that we need more empirical evidence to substantiate our claims.
   I'll check some of this out on the scope Oystla.
Yes, this is very fascinating stuff.
Merry Christmas to all and will get back to you in the new year.

Garfield

[Farrah Day]

Yes, time-out guys. Have a lovely Christmas time.

[z_p_e]

From the web page:

http://my.opera.com/H2earth/blog/show.dml/779891

FD, I have no doubt you've seen it.

Seems there was/is a missing choke in DL's SS version.

Anyway, here is Fig. 7-8 from the brief. He is showing two chokes (makes sense, and is what Puharich does also I believe). What he is showing is the model of an inductor. I hope folks don't think they need all these components in addition to the inductor itself.

Notice he is showing the cell modeled with a cap and resistor in parallel. This is correct as I see it and mentioned earlier. However, I am certain that this model is quite simplified, and one of the first tasks should be to quantify and completely model the cell element. Once done, it would be rather simple to analyse and "play" with things in order to see their effects.

I can't stress this enough.....model the cell!