Hi.

I've being doing experiments with diodes. My experiments include LEDs and germanium diodes. My interest results from the fact that we are constantly immersed in an environment full of electromagnetic waves that include radio waves and light. I've decided to document my experiments in the hope someone may find them useful. It may be possible that my results are obvious to some of you. But that might not be the case to all of you. So, here we go.

My curiosity about diodes started when I first read about the "Diode Storm" work. It's about shielded diodes producing power. Because I don't live in an shielded environment, I've decided to do some experiments in an electromagnetic noisy environment. Pages regarding Diode Storm work disappeared from the website (maybe pages have been moved to another place). I hope the author hasn't been killed by powerfull corporations.

When I started to record 100mV, I thought my results were uninteresting. But then I discovered my results were not so bad when comparing to results obtained by others. I've tried a bunch of diodes and I've concluded that the winner is (the best diode is): well, you can have a look at my conclusions at:

http://schulers.com/jpss/estudos/diodes/

  I hope you'll enjoy. 

JP

Interesting. I have a question on the use of a solar fence charger. This charger can operate for 2 weeks without sun. It is a 6 volt, 10 amp battery with a pulsed DC output at 1-second intervals with .15 joules and a voltage output around 8500 volts. Could this be used with high voltage diodes to produce a few amps?

Interesting. I have a question on the use of a solar fence charger. This charger can operate for 2 weeks without sun. It is a 6 volt, 10 amp battery with a pulsed DC output at 1-second intervals with .15 joules and a voltage output around 8500 volts. Could this be used with high voltage diodes to produce a few amps?

Hi,

You surely know Joule is Wattsecond i.e. 1 Watt power is used in 1 second.
You wrote  .15 Joule which then means 150 milliWatt in second.
If this  .15 Joule is the energy fed into the fence and the 8500V means the voltage level associated with this energy to give a certain (small) shock to the animals, then the current involved for 1 second is I= .15/8500=1.76*10^-5 Amper i.e. 17.6 microAmper and this repeats in 1 second intervals.  So no chance you could get Ampers from this output. 

If you could charge up high voltage capacitors with this 8500V (which certaily could take some time, depending on the caps value), then you could store some accumulated energy like in a photoflash cap and use it for higher current when you discharge the cap. In this case the higher current may mean Ampers too but then the stored energy is used up much rapidly than the charge up time was, so no free lunch... (ideally say for a hypotetical math example you charge up a cap to 8500V in 10 seconds with your consequtive output pulses and then if you disharge it in micro or milliseconds you get the high currents but this consumes the charge and another 10 second chargetime should come to repeat this process).

(see Nikola Tesla on this here http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/nt_on_ac.htm#Section_4  where the Counsel asked him on "using several thousand horsepower put into a condenser, you could take out of the condenser a million horsepower".)   
The bottom line is the power fed into a capacitor under a certain charge up time (i.e stored energy will be Watt times the second) can be taken out in a much shorter time to get a much higher power. You simply consume the inputted energy in a much less time you spent for the charge-up.

rgds,  Gyula

interesting 

gyula
  http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/nt_on_ac.htm#039
Thats a pretty interesting read. Tesla sounds kind of ticked off sometimes in it.

@ schuler

I put an RK44 diode in series with an antenna and it did not rectify the weak mV signal being received. I then replaced RK44 with a germanium diode and it did rectify the signal. So RK44 may have low forward voltage drop but they do not make good detectors.

@ schuler

I put an RK44 diode in series with an antenna and it did not rectify the weak mV signal being received. I then replaced RK44 with a germanium diode and it did rectify the signal. So RK44 may have low forward voltage drop but they do not make good detectors.

Germanium is very efficient up to 40% to 50% it also has the widest band gap, one thing I never tested on Germanium is if it is sensitive to Infrared.

Jerry

@ Anyone... I realize I am probably in the wrong forum, But can someone help me ??

I Have some of those wafer thin solar cells  .5v @ 3.5 Amps,  and I want to make a panel up of around
4.5 - 6 volts @ only  1 Amp, I know I can wire them up to make 4.5 or 6v but can I reduce the current somehow from 3.5 to 1 Amp without loosing much on the volts side ?

hi freepow

yes, you can - use a Pulse-Width Modulation circuit with the duty cycle adjusted to give you whatever proportion current you want from the panels max o/p

this means you get to use as much of the voltage as possible but essentially you're varying the load impedance to just draw your preferred current