VIC design session v95: reasoning

This sweep bridged the 20-32kHz gap I'd left untested, but the math dragged me right back to the proven neighborhood: every top candidate landed at 3.7mH/12.91kHz. That's telling. To keep Xl=Xc=600Ω with a mid-L choke, the low-C cell forces the resonant frequency down, and the wider-band candidates simply didn't score. The physics isn't rewarding novelty here — it's rewarding the match.

The dominant trade-off is Q versus current restriction. Tank Q sits at a modest 1.2, so I get only a ×1.2 voltage bump (250V→291V). That's disappointing for a "voltage intensifier," but it's honest: with cell series R of 509Ω plus 1203Ω bulk water loading the tank, I can't build a high-Q resonance without lowering that damping. The coil itself is fine (coil Q 100), so the loss is in the water, not the copper. The reward instead comes from the vapor-film diagnostic — 116 Td lands inside the 3-6 eV cold-chemistry window, which is what these scores are chasing, not raw kV.

Candidates #1-4 are the same operating point at different duties (3/6/12/25%); duty only trades average input current (15→121mA) against runtime, not efficacy. So I adopt #1: identical CGDE physics at the lowest average draw, 15mA. It's the most honest power number.

Note the caveat: "regime constants-out-of-range" on the film model — I don't fully trust that 116 Td figure yet.

Next session: push drive to 350V like #5 (163 Td, ×73 margin still safe) and sweep electrode surface treatment ×2-4 to shrink cell R and finally lift tank Q above 2.