Chet posted this earlier but then deleted it, I think it is possibly significant and so I will repost.
http://www.accelinstruments.com/Applications/WaveformAmp/Magnetic-Field-Generator.html
It claims to double the current in the resonant inductor and therefore doubling the associated magnetic field.
Now when I first had seen the circuit I thought I had seen it before.
Thanks for sharing this Peter, it was really quite interesting. I've found some seemingly unrelated threads and have tied them together.
I started reading about regenerative and super-regenerative radio receivers a while back and they sounded rather magical. Here's a good article from 'Cathode Ray', Wireless World (June, 1946) that goes into a good level of detail to explain the basics:
http://www.r-type.org/articles/art-285.htmThis image stood out:
Public Release & Translation of Dutch Patents by Arie De Geus
If oscillation is started from, say, 10 μVolts at A and allowed to grow at compound interest, say, 5%, until B, each cycle will be 1.05 times greater than the one before it. Suppose there are 150 cycles. Then the amplitude of the final one will be 10 × 1.05149, which is 10 × 1440. If the starting level had been, say, twice as great, the output would have been double, too. Output is exactly proportional to input.
You can see that there is exponential growth when the positive feedback is greater than 1, i.e. R>1.
This is what ChatGPT had to say:
A Regenerative receiver uses deliberate positive feedback, also known as “regeneration”, to increase the gain of the RF amplifier. A useful side-effect is to sharpen the tuning. This regeneration is adjustable; the art of tuning a regenerative receiver for a weak station is to get the positive feedback as high as possible without allowing oscillation to start.
On the other hand, a Super-regenerative receiver allows the oscillation to start, but “quenches” it at a frequency above the desired channel bandwidth (above the 5kHz or so audio bandwidth of an AM radio). Received RF energy helps the oscillation to start earlier, and build up faster to a high amplitude before the quenching happens, so the effect is to give a super-regenerative receiver enormously high gain and sensitivity. However, it cannot distinguish between tiny signals on the tuned frequency or larger ones slightly off station, so this sensitivity comes at some cost in interference rejection.
The super-regenerative receiver is based on the simpler regenerative radio. It uses a second lower frequency oscillation within the regeneration loop that interrupts or quenches the main RF oscillation. The super-regenerative detector is no longer linear in its behaviour.
My idea is to build a form of super-regenerative receiver without quenching and instead of receiving radio waves, my device would simply be a tuned parallel tank circuit that is hooked up to an inverting power supply.
The coil would be simply a single turn of tin plated copper pipe, with many Sendust cores (good for high frequency) threaded onto it. The coil pipe would pass through each of the cores, and the cores would have a secondary coil wound on in order to extract energy from the system. Several sources have mentioned that having secondaries on the inductor doesn't affect resonance.
Since there is only a single turn on the primary coil, there is no inter-turn or inter-winding capacitance to deal with. There might be some capacitance between primary and secondary coils, but I guess that can be dealt with by inserting a grounded screen (aluminium foil?) inbetween.
Here's a rough circuit of what I want to implement:
https://tinyurl.com/ypavyl8r. It doesn't have any form of positive feedback in it yet, and operates entirely on resonance.
This circuit is different to the one described by the ACCEL instruments page, which has both capacitors of equal capacitance. In my circuit the first series capacitor is of low capacitance (10% of total capacitance), and the parallel capacitor is higher capacitance (90% of total capacitance). This seems to amplify both voltage and current. If the inductance is larger than capacitance then this results in more amperage, whereas if capacitance is greater than inductance then this results in more voltage. This appears to be the inverse of the normal mode of operation, where capacitors 'convert' voltage to current and inductors 'convert' current to voltage.
High level summary of the main features of this design:
1. Efficient use of source battery - capacitor is charged from battery, and then capacitor is discharged through the load. Electrons can't complete the circuit from anode to cathode due to the non-conductive gap (dielectric) in the capacitor. I expect this to improve efficiency.
2. High switching frequency - more power per unit time.
3. Use of current amplifying circuit described here:
https://accelinstruments.com/Applications/WaveformAmp/Magnetic-Field-Generator.htmlIf you look at this circuit (from the super-regen article linked above):
Public Release & Translation of Dutch Patents by Arie De Geus
...take the antenna and resonant tank on the left hand side and rotate CCW 90 deg, you get:
Public Release & Translation of Dutch Patents by Arie De Geus
which looks awfully similar to:
Public Release & Translation of Dutch Patents by Arie De Geus
As you pointed out, Arie De Geus also had similar arrangements in his circuits.
Best regards,
Lee