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- Regarding transformer design, suppose you have a conventional EI transformer with two windings, 100ft and 200 ft. Now you get more wire, and make a HUGE-diameter transformer by circling the 100-ft winding once, and then circling the 200-ft winding next to that, twice. And then you wrap this “bundle” (of two wires) inside core material, figuring the cross-area proportionately by circumference, comparing to a smaller conventional EI-stacked transformer–so the huge coil still has as much “core area” as the regular transformer, just spread out over a wider area.
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- What would the differences of this huge-diameter transformer be? Would it work better, worse or the same? For an audio transformer would it respond to lower or higher frequencies better, worse or the same?
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And here I thought this would be a question about what Optimus does on his down time.
There’s resistance to electrical current in the coils, and there’s resistance to the flow or containment of magnetic field lines in the core material. Either of these resistances makes the transformer lossy, makes it couple poorly. Since the core and the coil are topologically linked, in the sense that each must pass through the center of the other, giving one of the two a big area must increase the loop length of the other, and decreasing the loop length of one must constrict the cross sectional area of the other.
So, one thing you do when you change a transformer the way I think you described is you push it off the optimal compromise point that, we hope, somebody picked for balancing the two loop shapes.
Of course there is a judgement about whether coil or core is more expensive, and what’s the cost of loss (is it the cost of energy or the cost of a precious signal or what).
Oh, yes, frequency response - I forgot that bit.
The big issue with transformer frequency response in the audio range is how badly the core shorts out the signal due to little loops circulating around the wrong way inside the core.
That is, you can imagine if you wrapped a solid wire loop, shorted together, just inside one of your coils, it would behave the same way as having an additional winding and short circuiting it - it would load the signal down and let less out at your intended outlet. Well, why isn’t the core itself equivalent to a shorted winding? Because it’s made of separate leaves of steel, so the loop is broken. In fact once upon a time they were insulated until somebody figured out that whatever oxides and crud result from rolling the sheet steel in the first place are good enough insulators. To make the transformer work better at high frequencies they make the steel in thinner leaves, which is more expensive (there’s also less lossy steel per se, also more expensive).
In fact avoiding these losses cheaply is the big reason for the railroad industry to use 20 Hz instead of 60 Hz in their power systems.
Well… I could blow the dust from my electronic books and wrap up a lesson in magnetic flux, parasitic currents, and explain all about the transformers, I know once upon a time I studied it…
but the fact is that all through the first paragraph of the original post, I was thinking: “huge robots, huge robots,—” It took my mind a lot of deduction to realize you were talking about those boring wire bundles… I really felt DISSAPOINTED!!!:mad:
So, damned your transformer question.
What do you people think about those new transformer series?
Am I the only one who thinks they pokemonized what was once a GREAT series for the new audience, used to far more stupid material?
Has anyone watched it?
Saludos: P0L
You are not making the connection schedule all that clear.
To what are the extra windings connected ?Are there in fact extra windings or just a rearrangment of the original windings?
You will know of course that increasing the Q will decrease the bandwidth so if the effect of doing what you describe tends to decrease bandwidth, the the frequency response will be narrower.
Better still, describe your transformer more lucidly.