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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.