From: Paul
Date: Mon, 07 Oct 2002 10:38:29 +0100
Subject: Re: [TSSP] Papers
Hi All, My gut feeling is that indeed there is material within the project that would be worthy of a proper write up. The reasons I haven't set about doing this are several, some of which are: a) You'll notice the lack of references to earlier work in the various project docs. That's not so say that earlier work doesn't exist, just that we haven't done the necessary trawl through the literature to establish just where our efforts fit into the existing knowledge on the subject of resonating solenoids. Now in some ways we've more or less started from scratch, deriving things from basic principles, so in that sense there's not much to refer to. But it's important to make an effort to find out if earlier work has come to the same conclusions re the equations of the coil, equivalent reactances, V and I profiles, etc, to which we would make due reference. That would take maybe a few weeks work in a university library, and not really possible via the public local library 'service' in rural parts of the UK. b) I don't know how to write a paper. I've no professor to look over my shoulder and advise what should go in and what should be left out, etc, etc. Without such support, I don't know how an amateur can produce a paper isn't immediately recognisable as 'clearly the work of an amateur'. c) Without affiliation to a recognised academic institute it would be hard to get an amateur paper into the peer review system, except perhaps through some of the more 'desperate' journals. Mere mention of the word Tesla would destine any submission to the bin, I think, in view of the number of crank papers received every month by physics depts and journals. d) There are lots of technical weaknesses which would be quickly identified by an expert, and all these would have to be sorted out. Again, lack of a 'prof' who can give a brutally fair assessment of where the work stands on the road to publication is a severe handicap. e) Some of the experimental work would have to be repeated under more controlled conditions. We would have to do a proper job of estimating the errors in both measurements and predictions (a tough job), and we would have to make an effort to pin down more carefully the limitations of the programs/theories, etc. For example, can you apply (as I did yesterday) tssp to calculating the Fres of a UHF resonator, or a loading coil for a HF tuner? Ok, that's just a few points. It's all do-able, but represents a lot of work. Best tackled by someone in the project who can work within academia, has the use of a 'prof', library, etc. They would gain career mileage by pulling together this research and putting it on a professional level, but they would be presenting the work of the project rather than their own, which would have a higher work/reward ratio. A minimal scope for an article would be to derive the differential equations of a single coil, and show that their solution matches measured mode spectra and V/I profiles. An extension would be to define the equivalent reactances and show how they relate to the exterior currents and voltages, stored energy, Fres, Q factor, and i/o impedances. A further extension, which is the bit I most like, would be to describe the coils using integral operators, as I've tried to do in pn1401. It really needs treatment by a proper mathematician to bring out the elegant way in which the lumped equations of systems of coils become distributed equations by replacing each lumped L,C,R,G with its corresponding integral operator to represented the distributed reactance. This would be the hardest for me to do without a lot of guidance from someone who knew their math. I feel that somewhere in there is a systematic way to construct a model of a system of distributed coils and electrodes, by starting with a lumped circuit model (eg Antonio's multiple resonator networks) and 'distributise' them by an unambiguous process of replacement of lumped values with integral operators. That would be a neat thing for an expert to write about, if only we had one. Before anything can happen, some professor or other would have to lend us some support and perhaps even provide some kind of institutional affiliation, which I don't think is too likely. Having said all that, I'll end on a positive note. I'm sure that we have enough 'content' and that if things did come together, there could be a genuinely worthwhile paper in there somewhere. Are there any suggestions as to a way forward? Should I write a modest article anyway just to see how it looks? How would I go about doing a thorough search for prior work on the mode spectra of solenoids? Who else has written up definitions of equivalent reactances? That would be my first stumbling block. -- Paul Nicholson, --
Maintainer Paul Nicholson, paul@abelian.demon.co.uk.