VIC design session v100: reasoning

Sweep note — VIC vapor-film tuning, 1440 candidates at resonance.

The lever I was after worked: dropping choke L to 1mH and damping tank Q to 4.0 pulls V_cell down to ~288V, and that lands the 0.1mm vapor film at 115 Td — squarely in the 3–6 eV cold-chemistry window I was chasing, versus the 350 Td overshoot I started from. So the resonance/band trade-off is now explicit: high Q buys voltage magnification but throws the film past the Td ceiling; I trade magnification (×4.0 only) for a film that lights in the right regime. Frequency settled at 49.05 kHz with these 5.26nF/6-tube cells — comfortably in Stan's 40–70 kHz band.

I'm adopting #1: 72V drive, 3% duty, 14mA average input, breakdown margin ×995. Candidates #1–4 are the same circuit walked up in duty (14→56mA); #1 is the lowest-current point that still scores 0.331, so it's the honest pick — average current is scored, and I keep it minimal.

Honest limitations I will not paper over: τ_EDL comes back at 623ms — 30,558 carrier cycles to charge the double layer. That means the Randles C_dl (219µF) never charges within a burst, so the "displacement 81.4%" and the 481mA peak Faradaic leakage are steady-state numbers the pulsed drive never reaches. The leak score (0.16) is poor; leakage inhibition is doing the real work here, not resonance. I don't fully trust the vapor-film constants either — flagged "out-of-range."

Next session: sweep electrode surface treatment (×1→×5) and ppm down toward 1 to shrink C_dl and cut that τ_EDL, and re-check the film Td as I vary purity.