Quest to find the perfect voltage.....

[Java_Az]

Yeah thats a pot It is a Bourns 20k +/- 5% wirewound. I didnt make that card though i cheated it is a Tenergy universal variable voltage battery charging card with USB port. Got it right after i started vaping. I did short it out about a week ago and fried the chip that drives the LEDs which sucked but it still works. I would get me a new one since it was only 20 bucks but they quit making them. But really with my mod almost complete it will make this card pretty much obsolete.

Yeah i wouldn't tear up a high dollar cord to get silver wire. Try ebay i got a bunch off there for really cheap I think 13 bucks shipped for 50 or 60 feet of 22awg. I am sure you might find some thicker stuff on there.

I would be happy to look at your circuit. Send me a pm with a link or if you want to send it email let me know i can PM my address.

 

[kjj]

My view is that the quest for perfect voltage is folly. I've discussed this elsewhere, and I don't intend to derail your thread, but if you haven't done it already, please look into wattage control, at the very least, before spending too much time or money on this.

 

[AriM]

My view is that the quest for perfect voltage is folly. I've discussed this elsewhere, and I don't intend to derail your thread, but if you haven't done it already, please look into wattage control, at the very least, before spending too much time or money on this.

they are married to each other....also way ahead of you....I used the term voltage, because it's what most folks seem to think means current draw....I know it's not an exactly accurate thread title (it was meant as kind of a joke)....

I just ran an interesting experiment tonight....5 volts at the atty, with a current draw of .8 amps on the PSU....felt like 3 volts at 1.7 (ish) amps....

total wattage draw on the back of the psu was around 15 watts.....that is exactly the reason I ditched the linear PSU for the switching supply....the switching supply more accurately represents a constant current DC source....this particular PSU runs well into the range of efficiency of a battery (damn close anyhow)....

the draw from the same load on the linear supply was more than 45 watts (with 60 watt peaks)...

the bottom line about atty performance is a relationship of current draw to impedance....at least that is my theory and experience so far....I am going to start doing my tests with a fixed resistor as the load after i get a chart built on the current market of attys....

It's hard to know where to go, when you don't have accurate references of real world atty electrical specs....this is why I want to move into a 12v coil....it would be much much much more efficient....12 v at high current draw would equal FAR less wattage....which is the most important determination of battery life....it would be easy to regulate coil heat with the proper materials....a large buss bar (think heavy duty batter tab) would be an ideal heating element at high voltage....

thanks for bringing it up....I used to build competition grade r/c models....so I am really pretty hip to the realities of battery power....the only purpose of this experiment is to gather information on what the current items available on the market can handle (by that I mean atty's and batteries)

I have already sourced high discharge, lightweight lithium phosphate cells....they run at 12.9v with very high watt/hour ratings...they aren't much bigger than a cell phone....only problem right now is price....

I am sure a lot of people are having a good laugh over this thread though....trust me I'm not as dumb as I think I am....

 

[AriM]

Yeah i wouldn't tear up a high dollar cord to get silver wire. Try ebay i got a bunch off there for really cheap I think 13 bucks shipped for 50 or 60 feet of 22awg. I am sure you might find some thicker stuff on there. .

WOW! that is a decent price...did you get any alloy numbers on the wire? pure silver ltz for that price is phenomenal....I will go check that out....I wonder if a ltz braid of solid core (old DIY cat5 speaker cable trick) would do the trick....I should have known better than to use tinned copper lamp wire....I guess I was to excited to get the PSU and bread board out....I bet 4 pair speaker wire would also work well...I could pull the jacket and braid it (ltz array)

thanks again for your help.....

 

[Java_Az]

Dont think there was too much as far as specs on it, besides being 22 awg silver Teflon covered airplane wire braided 5 strand. Was left over from a project so it didn't have any packaging or come on a original spool.

Edit: link http://cgi.ebay.com/50-Feet-Tsunami-V10SW18S-Silver-18-Gauge-Speaker-Wire-/350339328419?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item5191d9e9a3#ht_1496wt_1141
http://cgi.ebay.com/SCOSCHE-18ga-GAUGE-1000-SPEAKER-WIRE-BLUE-SILVER-CABLE-/370250462312?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item5634a5b468#ht_3742wt_907

 

[Java_Az]

Looks like most of the wire on there is silver plated. Not sure about how those speaker wires are made they dont really say.

 

[AriM]

Looks like most of the wire on there is silver plated. Not sure about how those speaker wires are made they dont really say.

ah yes I have dealt with this stuff before....it's a thin electro plate of the strands (a few microns)
This stuff suffers from skin effect and has a high ripple. Since the resistance of the surface coating is different from the core. Electrons actually flow across the skin faster than they do the core and this causes massive amounts of induced resonance. I tried to use these products for building some of my test equipment. Had lots of problems. They do have very low resistance though. (until you rub off the silver plated, or the copper oxide eats it's way through it)

The stuff I use now is pure silver strand, braided in a litz array (ltz). Since the silver is very soft it's easy to work with. The impedance of 24 GA solid silver core is equal to the impedance of 8GA OFC copper. Also the biggest benefit of pure silver, is that silver oxide is still silver. So when it oxidizes/corrodes it's electric specs don't change.

I have found that the formaldehyde in PVC/PTFE jacketing actually destroys most of the cable you put it in. So I use unbleached cotton jacketing. It's an excellent dielectric also. It has it's share of problems though. Insects and rats like to eat it, and if your HV lead shorts, it will catch on fire (but so will PVC/PTFE)

Thanks for linking me. The stuff I have been using is about $120/foot, so I was really hoping to find a cheap alternative.

I am going to grab some better copper right now (8GA ofc) and try to build the leads in a helical array.

I really appreciate you trying to help me out.

The circuit I was referencing before is based on a resonant tunneling diode. It's not my own design. I barely understand how it works. From what I do know the tunneling diode uses plasma states to create negative resistance....it's called quantum mechanical tunneling....it's much the same way a VFT (light) works....it can actually achieve a higher output current than it's input....much like a transformer, but without the problems associated with transformers (requiring negative feedback and isolation)

 

[Java_Az]

Well you could just get you some 12 awg copper going to be thick but should get you down to .1 or less it is rated @ .001588 ohms per a foot. What is the problem your having? my PT has a bit more then .3 ohms resistance and it vapes pretty damn good. Really you should be able to add a bit of voltage to counter the effects of having added resistance in the cord. Is your plan to make a battery mod at some point or just really top end passthrough?

 

[AriM]

Well you could just get you some 12 awg copper going to be thick but should get you down to .1 or less it is rated @ .001588 ohms per a foot. What is the problem your having? my PT has a bit more then .3 ohms resistance and it vapes pretty damn good. Really you should be able to add a bit of voltage to counter the effects of having added resistance in the cord. Is your plan to make a battery mod at some point or just really top end passthrough?

the p[roblem that I am having is that the load of the lead wires is greater than the fluctuation of the atty resistance.....I found that the attys fluctuate in ambient resistance by about .1 ohm or so....I am trying to determine the current electrical specs of the attys. I would idealy like my circuit and PSU to lend as little to those numbers as possible

so I know that adding voltage/current does make up for the impedance addition, but then I have to do the math to get the actual draw of the atty (in watts). It's just a bit fussy, not something that is a major hurdle. This is why I am using a switching supply....it is efficient enough to simulate a battery.

I am ultimately trying to build a microcontrolled VRM (dVRM) to regulate power, with a simple software interface and some flash memory. That way a simple control program can be stored for control logic. The goal is to build a small batter operated PV, with a direct inject atomizer and running at high voltage (to increase efficiency). I need to see if any current attys on the market can handle high voltage and what their basic electrical properties are. That way i don't have to engineer an atomizer from scratch. I can simply modify a current product.

the idea would be to have a button that ignites the coil and mists juice on a high voltage coil, with the ability for users to select predefined programs.

For example, XYZ juice vapes best at abc volts (really amps) with an injection rate of xyz ml per firing of the switch. So a user could use a simple software interface to find their ideal vaping conditions, then store those as presets with names.

I know my posts here are long, but I have been trying to spell out my goals from the beginning of the thread. I am going to start plotting voltage/current draw over the time the switch is fired to try to see where the peaks and sags are, that lead to inconsistent vaping.

I figured I would post all of my findings so that people can use the data in the future to construct their own simple devices.

I did manage to source some diodes and 3 leg positive VR's (adjustable). I am going to use them as filter gates leading to the atty, to minimize ripple. They operate as filtering devices when you leave the adjust leg open.

so with the diodes and filtering I should be able to stop all positive feedback along the lead wires, and be sure that my voltage source is super flat.....

I really don't know what the point of all this is, other than me having fun. I am one of those nerd engineer types. I don't go out to night clubs, I build things.