AC: I am going to try to give some colour commentary for Exnihiloest's comments. Whatever conductor, like the terminal of a neon or any piece of metal, possesses its own capacity, i.e it constitutes a capacitor, the other "plate" being the surrounding (ground, earth...) I will cite a related example here. He is saying that a piece of metal can have a large surface area. This conductive surface area will exhibit a stray capacitance with it's surroundings. So if you connect one lead of a neon to the metal plate and the other lead is connected to a high-frequency AC source, the metal plate's stray capacitance completes the circuit and acts as an AC earth ground, a.k.a.; "it loops the circuit." (Current flows in "loops") Make the metal plate larger, the stray capacitance gets larger, and hence the neon gets brighter. You see Lidmotor use a block of aluminum for his "ground." He really means it's his AC ground due to its inherent stray capacitance to earth ground. The stray capacitance to earth ground is large enough to act as a decent AC ground for some of his circuits. Current is consumed. For starters, he is French and he is doing a literal translation from "consommation de courant." That actually would normally mean "power consumption." What he is really saying in this particular case is that the AC current flowing to and from the earth ground goes through the stray capacitance. This is real and measurable and indicates that real AC power is flowing through the circuit. That's in contrast to what could be a mistaken impression that no current is flowing because there is no directly obvious means for the current to flow. Even though this capacity is very weak (<< 1pF), it loops the circuit When he says "weak" it is synonymous with "small." It's "weak" because it's ability to pass AC current is very limited because of the very small size of the capacitance. Granted his posting was not as clear as it could be. Language is a bit of an issue, but a relatively minor one. In my case, I understood exactly what he said and he is dead on. I have been reading him for a while and he really knows his stuff. MileHigh
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Topic: DrStiffler's exotic generator. (Read 30473 times)
