Re: chokes

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <Mddeming-at-aol-dot-com>

In a message dated 10/4/01 2:16:08 PM Eastern Daylight Time, tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
writes: 



>
>    One useful contribution to general knowledge here would be for someone 
> to go to the trouble of trying to model the outer layers of an NST 
> secondary and then determine current and voltage distribution during a 
> discharge.  Can surely be accomplished by modern modeling techniques, 
> but I don't know how to do it. 
>
> Ed 



After twenty years as a systems simulation and forecasting engineer in the
pipeline industry, I am somewhat aware of the strengths and weaknesses of
simulator packages. They work quite well for deterministic steady state systems
and quasideterministic periodic dynamical systems and poorly for chaotic
dynamical systems. I also happen to believe (and it IS a belief) that chokes
probably have too many disadvantages that outweigh any possible benefits. I
also believe that simulation applied to chaotic dynamical systems is, as one on
my numerical methods professors used to say, "The fine art of pushing a dead
mouse through a maze and carefully recording what it does." Put in more prosaic
terms, the region of stability of the model is never exactly coincident with
the region of stability of the system it represents. Usually, simulations are
only tested against reality when they say that something will work, not when
they say it won't. 
In chaotic systems, non-linearities are as likely to cascade as they are to die
out, and this is where second-order approximations can run into trouble, still
leaving room for experimental work to verify the models. 

Matt D.