[NewCandle] Parasitic Cap Charging

[John Winterflood]

Keith Nagel wrote:
> I did read enough of Ron's site to understand that the
> circuit he was working with was something quite different
> from what is shown at the site you point to.
I am sure that creatorguy's circuit is Ron's current one although his 
board layout is quite different.  There has been significant evolution 
of the circuit since early LED driving days but I believe this one is 
Ron's latest.  Also it seems that Ron has had some PCBs made to allow 
the "hobbyists" to replicate his work better..
> The main
> feature of interest ( hence the thread title ) was the
> way he was using parasitic capacities to charge a big
> electrolytic capacitor. This from a cursory reading;
> I could be missing things due to the length of the
> original page and time constraints on this end.
Yes you are right.  It was very interesting that such a small aerial (an 
AV-plug or "coherence converter" across the capacitor terminals) was 
able to pick up and rectify such a large charge.  I would really like to 
see what a nearby RF generator tuned to the quarter wave length of the 
AV-plug might be capable of in order to know if it is really 
extraordinary or not.  I don't have much experience with RF and very 
little feeling for what RF effects might be considered ordinary or 
extraordinary.

The thing you may have missed and that fired my interest most was that 
Ron claimed that the charge energy built up in a 3 Farad cap during a 
period of 15 minutes was almost six times the total energy supplied to 
his oscillator during that period.  Assuming the "3.0 FARAD" printed on 
the side of the cap is for real, then the remaining measurements are 
really simple DC measurements (power in: from the bench supply running 
the oscillator, and energy accumulated: from the voltage across the cap 
after charging).  There is room for a certain amount of error - For 
instance Ron does not clearly spell out how well the initial charge on 
the cap was known, and the 4mA from the supply is the least significant 
digit of a 3 digit reading.  But 590% is a very large efficiency and 
leaves a lot of room for error, especially when one would guess that 
such a crazy process might be 1% or 10% efficient at best!
> I think we need to wait for Ron to repost his material,
>   
Yes.  I am also keen to hear about more recent developments.  I did take 
a snapshot of the webpage on which the 3 Farad cap charging is described 
and that is how I can still peruse and write about it in detail.  I 
expect it will be updated somewhat when he comes back on-line.
> My true negative resistance circuit was done entirely
> with passive components. The key component was a spark
> gap; about as nonlinear a component as you can get.
> Again, there was nothing special about the energy balance
> in that circuit; what was special was the self switching
> nature of the spark gap when run in the correct fashion.
> The circuit was continuous wave RF on the output,
> with DC for the input.
Remarkable - one day I would like to see a sketch of the circuit and a 
drawing of the spark gap.  How much RF power would the circuit 
generate?  I think in Tesla's day, a spark gap was about the only active 
component that was available to get any sort of HF excitation going.  We 
sure have come a long way since then but we still seem to be missing 
some fundamental energy tapping ingredient - that seems to have been 
stumbled over and lost again a few times in history.

J.