From: Paul
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2002 09:16:25 +0100
Subject: Re: [TSSP] Happy Birthday!
Greg Leyh wrote: > The realm of popular coil design had been depressingly > cut-and-try, until the TSSP came along. Maybe it still is. After all, the project doesn't seem to have made much of an impact on the way people build coils. Partly this is because coils as built nowadays are already pretty well refined, but mainly because the questions a coiler would most like to have answered are still pending. Questions such as what is the best number of turns to use in a given situation, how do you select the optimum toroid, and other quite basic things that a coiler might reasonably ask are unable to be answered at the moment. Perhaps the most direct contribution to coiling has gone through Terry's use of effective inductance and realistic voltage profiles in E-Tesla, so that our understanding the 'shape' of secondary resonant modes is making a difference, by way of refinement to existing techniques. I do notice that prior to this project, pupman archives contain a significant percentage of posts speculating around the topic of self capacitance, etc, and these have almost vanished now. Similarly, meaningless debates between the merits of lumped and transmission line operation appear to have stopped too. So here again we may claim some impact, but on the whole, we have yet to tackle the real issues. We've layed some firm foundations and built up some useful tools, but the real difficulties lay ahead, rather than behind, I think. > Who would've imagined that there could be so many intricacies to a > simple, single-layer, cylindrical solenoid? The TC is truly the > 'chaotic pendulum' of the EM world. Absolutely! There's such a lot of interesting physics packed into a TC. It always strikes me that you could teach a whole physics course, or write a book, using a TC as the central theme and following its theoretical tendrils out to other areas of physics. For example the representation of the normal modes of the coil in terms of eigenfunctions of an operator follows the same mathematical lines as the description of a whole host of things in physics, such as quantum states. You could demonstrate the classical mechanics of Hamilton and Lagrange by using the TC's fields to show how the basic physics which underlies Newton's laws of motion also applies to fields as well as objects. The confined nature of the fields in this case makes the pendulum analogy quite apt. Chaotic? Well we could certainly reach a tendril out into thermodynamics, and a whole load of other things. For me, the TC is a never ending source of inspiration. Thanks for your comments Greg. I'm sure everyone appreciates your enthusiasm, even though you've been a bit too busy to get stuck in. I find too, that I have to go away from it for a few months at a time, now and again, to focus on work and other things. As regards web traffic, tssp gets a few hundred hits a day now, it's gradually been going up all year, for some reason, although the number of sites linking to it is still negligible. I get the impression there's a need for some explanatory pages at a lighter technical level so I'm working on that. Meanwhile the visitor I'm afraid has to work quite hard to figure things out. By way of encouraging coilers to delve more into the theory of the subject, I thought of running a quiz game. Something along the lines of http://www.abelian.demon.co.uk/tesla-quiz/ Several of the questions would require a bit of thought and some delving into web pages and text books. Wonder whether something like this would appeal to coilers, either as a one-off or an on-going game? -- Paul Nicholson, --
Maintainer Paul Nicholson, paul@abelian.demon.co.uk.