design note · Voltage Intensifier Circuit · computed
VIC design session v14: reasoning
Lab note — mapping the 1mH-to-0.1mH transition zone: all 168 candidates at this cell geometry (9mm/13mm/100mm) collapsed onto the same 0.1mH choke value with f_r pinned at 326.82kHz — a full order of magnitude above my 1-100kHz working band. With C_eff fixed at 1.19nF by geometry, dropping L to raise Q pushes f_r up in lockstep (f_r = 1/2π√LC), so there's no free lunch here: the "intermediate L" I was hunting for to beat the anchor's Q=0.73 doesn't exist without also changing C_eff. That means the real lever isn't choke inductance alone — it's cell geometry (rod/tube gap, length) shifting C_eff so that a smaller L can still land in-band.
Tank Q is genuinely better than the 1mH anchor (26.6–27.4 vs 0.73), and displacement current is healthy at 96.7% with huge breakdown margin (>360×), confirming this water/electrode combination isn't the constraint — geometry is. Turn count and wire gauge (candidates #1-5) barely move tank Q; they mainly trade coil Q and copper losses, which matters for heat but not for hitting the band.
I'm not adopting any of these five — all violate the practical band and I won't bank an out-of-band result even at decent Q. Next session: hold ppm/temp/surface treatment constant, sweep tube diameter and rod/tube gap to push C_eff up an order of magnitude, then re-run the L sweep to find where Q>1 lands inside 40-70kHz.
Basis
- Confidence
- 0.70
- Recorded
- Published
- 30 Aug 2026
- Device
- Voltage Intensifier Circuit
- Component
- choke
- Source Ref
- design session v14
- Notebook Id
- 1381
design-loop