The Textbook Behind the VIC, 2: the water is a condenser, and a leaky one

Part 2 of 6 in The Textbook Behind the VIC: 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6

What Meyer wrote

Meyer is explicit that the cell is a capacitor, and just as explicit that the water is also a resistance across it. From Energy of the Future (raum&zeit, 1990):

The dielectric properties (insulator to the flow of amps) of natural water (dielectric constant being 78.54 @ 25c) between the electrical plates E1/E2) forms the capacitor (ER). Water now becomes part of the VIC in the form of "resistance" between electrical ground and pulse-frequency positive-potential...helping to prevent electron flow within the pulsing circuit (AA) of Figure 1-1.

And from the memo Dual Voltage Resonant "Q", on why a capacitor matters at all:

This opposes any changes in circuit voltage. A voltage change cannot occur until the stored charges can be altered through current flow... if allowed.

His patent Method For The Production Of A Fuel Gas puts it in the first claim: "a capacitor, in which the water is included as a dielectric liquid between capacitor plates".

What Fleming wrote

The Leyden jar is Fleming's condenser, and his picture of it is the one to keep in mind when thinking about the water cell:

When a condenser or Leyden jar is discharged through a conductor, the potential energy runs down in the form of an electric current. In this case we have a similar state of things to that existing when a bent spring is released.

— Fleming, §6 of Chapter V, pp. 374–375 (part 22)

More useful still, Fleming worked through the exact case Meyer describes: a condenser with a resistance across its terminals — a leaky condenser — in series with an inductive circuit (§31 of Chapter III, pp. 187–190, part 11). He shows that the pair behaves as if the coil's resistance had gone up and its inductance down, and that with the right values the leaky condenser cancels the coil's inductance altogether. That is part 6 of this tutorial. For now, the point is that Meyer's "capacitor with resistance" is not a contradiction. It is a standard textbook problem with a standard solution.

How leaky, measured

Don Gabel measured the estate's Delrin-cased tube cells on an LCR meter in 2009 (VIC coil readings, "The tube cells"). The meter reports a capacitance and a dissipation factor D. D is the ratio of what a component wastes to what it stores: a good capacitor reads well under 0.1; a D above 1 means the part is behaving more like a resistor than a capacitor.

Read as a capacitance with a resistance across it, the rain-water cell at 1 kHz is 21 nF in parallel with about 260 Ω (R = 1 / (D·2πf·C)). The workbook does not record which model the meter used, but this one orders the waters the way their conductivities do: the same arithmetic gives about 17 Ω for tap water and about 255 Ω for the distilled water, which in that cell behaved almost exactly like the rain water.

What 260 Ω across 21 nF means is a time constant — Fleming's "time constant of the condenser", the product of resistance and capacity — of about 5 microseconds. A charge put on that cell drains through the water in a few microseconds. Pulses spaced hundreds of microseconds apart will each start from nearly nothing.

The archive's film Resonant Action runs the same calculation for Meyer's own 1.52 nF cavity across four grades of water: 15.5 Ω and effectively instant for tap water, and 85 kΩ and 129 microseconds for deionised. That is the practical meaning of Meyer's own insistence on water quality. The leak is not a detail. It decides whether the capacitor holds a charge long enough for anything else in this tutorial to happen.

What to measure

• Your cell's capacitance and dissipation factor, empty and with the water you will use, at your pulse frequency. A capacitance reading with a D above 1 is really a resistance reading.
• The water's conductivity, with a meter, at the same time. Write both down together.
• From those, R·C: the time your cell can hold a charge. Compare it with the gap between your pulses.

Next: part 3, a choke can raise the voltage.