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Re: In vs. Out
From: William Noble[SMTP:William_B_Noble-at-msn-dot-com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 1997 12:51 AM
To: Tesla List
Subject: RE: In vs. Out
at the risk of being somewhat of a radical here, why not try a totally
different tact - let us imagine that input power is at least well defined and
in theory measurable (a hot wire and a photo cell being one way).
Imagine a "quality" metric which is a function of 2 variables - spark length
and overall intensity. Max spark length can be measured,it's a number of
meters (feet, centimeters, Ells, whatever unit you choose)
Intensity can also be objectively measured - a convenient unit is total
brightness, measured using a "standard" photo cell with a "standard" lens.
This could be cheap stuff, like a silicon solar cell from Radio shack with no
lens, at a specified distance, or a cadmium sulfide photo resistor mounted in
a disposable camera body.
The quality metric should give a bigger number for more brightness,and for
more spark length. So, I would recommend something of the form:
(brighness/K)*spark length
Select K so that given agreed units of brighness (ohms mesured on the standard
cell, candellas, lumens per steradian, again, whatever you agree on) the
result of a bright spark divided by K will be close to 1, that way a "weak
spark" will be penalized in a standard maner, and a nice thick spark will be
suitably rewarded.
Note that you would also want to average the reading over several seconds.