Now, following your conversation for a while I noticed that pomodoro expects voltage to be created by simply placing the radioactive element
either near a conductor or even on top of a semiconductor.
If you read the paper of Brown or what I have repeated here as a excerpt in one of my last postings he stated that a wire becomes sort of superconducting...and not creating a voltage difference at its terminals.
It is difficult to measure the inner ionized state of wire alone. Lets assume you take one meter of a copper wire AWG 18 = 1 mm diameter, put your ohmmeter on it an measure the inner resistance. What do you get ? Zero reading. How in the world will you be able to destinguish any difference in a 1 meter long wire with and without radioactive coating ? Probability zero.
In order to get a readable value you need say 50 meter. Do we have enough radioactive material to cover the surface of these 50 meters ?
Even if we take a small wireAWG 38 = 0.1 mm diameter the problem still exists. And in such a small wire there are not that much copper-atoms to be ionized so the effect will be too small
So this is the reason why an LC-tank must be used for having a chance to measure the Q of the LC-tank.
Q is mainly determined by the Q of the inductance as the Q of a capacitor generally is way better than that of an inductor
Q for series-resonance
Q = Xl/ R
R being the resistance in ohm, Xl is reactance of the inductor
and for parallell-resonance :Q = R * squareroot of C/L
C for capacitance, L for inductance.
We need to observe the dynamics of the system. One way is to trigger a parallell-tank with a square wave ( knowing its resonance-frequency before) and watch the damping of the triggered oscillation. This then means that you need to build two precise identical LC-tanks using handpicked identical parts which must be selected by precise measurement of capacitance and inductance.
So, you see, there is a lot of work ahead if you want to be sucessfull.
Here is a german paper published by some old radio-professionals which gives you a circuit at the end using a simple NE555-Timer to
perform such a test
http://www.radiomuseum.org/forumdata/upload/Guetemessung%20mit%20Rechtecksignal.pdfText below the first scope-screenshot explained : Kreisgüte = Q = number of oscillations times 5,
condition: amplitude Uss has reached half of the start-value. You have to visually count the number of oscillations along the time-scale
to that point where the amplitude has fallen to half of the start-value and then multiply this number by 5.
Some additional points to take into consideration:
Bild 58a shows a test-method using a trigger-coil. The trigger coil must be just 2 or three windings and loose coupling to the LC-tank so that the lc-tank is not "forced"by the trigger-coil to follow its frequency because than you will not see the resonance clearly.
resonant Frequency of the lC-tank should not exceed 10 Megacycles as the capacitance of the probe is distorting the resonance-frequency.
Bild 58b uses the circuit at the end of the document ( build into a box ) triggering the LC-tank with the 1 picoFarad capacitor.
LC-tank to be tested is located at the lower right corner ( 500p - Lx )
Kator01