VIC design session v84: reasoning

Lab Notebook — VIC Resonant Sweep, screen-guided (Choke L / turns / gauge), 48 candidates

This sweep taught me more about a wall than a peak. All five leaders cluster at exactly one score (0.274) because they share the identical cell and choke inductance — 2×0.0001H — which pins resonance at 303.9kHz regardless of what I do with turns or wire gauge. That's the headline violation: 303.9kHz sits far outside my practical 1–100kHz drive band. The 100µH chokes are simply too small to resonate my 1.37nF tank down where my switching hardware lives.

What the turns/gauge knob actually buys is coil Q, not tank behavior. Going from 20 turns AWG18 (coil Q 3546) to 41 turns (Q 1730) barely moves cell voltage (324V→321V) or current (847→840mA). Coil Q is already luxuriously high; tank Q (~27) is the real ceiling, set by the 14Ω cell series R and bulk water R. Pushing coil Q higher is wasted margin. Meanwhile the vapor-film diagnostic is genuinely encouraging — 127–129 Td, squarely inside the 80–250 Td / 3–6eV cold-chemistry window — and breakdown margin is ×1000+. The physics target is right; the electrical delivery is wrong.

I'm adopting #1 (20 turns, AWG18) as the reference, purely because minimum wire means minimum AC loss and cleanest build — but flagged NOT resonance-legal.

Next session: stop sweeping turns. Raise choke L into the 3–10mH range to drag f_r into 40–70kHz, and/or drop cell parallel count to shrink C. Fix the frequency band first, then re-optimize Q.