For a lab bench variac that has a dial connected to a brush that slides across the winding, does anyone know how many winding/taps there typically are? Or another way of putting it, what is the typical voltage step between windings? Say there are 100 windings, meaning about 1.2 V per winding (ignoring for the moment that it might have taps for output voltages > input voltage). Would it really go down to
1.2 volts (very first tap/winding)? I'm interested in voltage control at low voltages.
Gene wrote in news:6564dc10-3bb0-47d4-b2fb- snipped-for-privacy@z1g2000yqn.googlegroups.com:
On most of the variacs I've looked at closely, the brush contacts several windings and it's hard to tell if there's a "step" in voltage. I'd recommend using it with a low voltage transformer; I think you'll get a finer range of voltage control.
As a sideline issue, the comment about the wiper arm shorting one winding intrigued me.
** There is no hard short.
See the other replies.
That one winding would produce low voltage and high current,
** There is no hard short.
See the other replies.
does that have a history of causing failure?
** There is no hard short.
See the other replies.
Cost is dangerous? Please explain.
** Good safety practice is to *never connect* a load to a variac that CANNOT handle the FULL output voltage - connecting a load that can only handle a tiny fraction of that voltage ( like 1%) is plain NUTS !!!
PLUS a variac provides NO isolation from the AC supply - so a missing or reverse connected neutral conductor means that both connections to the variac are at a dangerous ( ie full line ) voltage.
If you've got a variac that outputs the range
0-line voltage and you output to the primary on a 12v transformer.....
** That was never the OP's Q nor relevant to my comment.
Please learn to read before posting here again and wasting people's time.
Shorting one (or two, or whatever) resistors in a string is NOT the same as shorting one (or two or whatever) turns in a transformer because the resistors are passive dividers of the applied voltage across the entire chain; while each turn of the autotransformer independently dissipates the applied power, at the same time, each turn also *generates* power as a result of being wound around the powered magnetic core.
Do you realiez that one can conceptualize it as resistors? Maybe this is the leap of faith you have? Luckily good basic run of the mill impedence comes to the rescue:
formatting link
OMG!!!!
"just as impedance extends Ohm's law to cover AC circuits, other results from DC circuit analysis such as voltage division, current division, Thevenin's theorem, and Norton's theorem, can also be extended to AC circuits by replacing resistance with impedance."
Do you understand that? The autotranformer is just one big voltage divider. abstractly at least... it does this a bit different than a resistive network but it works out to be the same. After all, we were talking about the current instead of the voltage reduction. For resistors the voltage is reduced by the drop in potential across a resistive element. For the inductors the voltage is converted into a magnetic field but then converted back into an electric field. Different principles at work but same abstract analysis. (This is because the current through the windings is exactly that... regardless of what the inductor is doing to limit the current.
In fact since it seems to escape you guys:
V---L1--A--L2---gnd
What is the voltage at point A? Is it L1*L2/(L1+L2)?? Assuming the inductors have the same construction so there inductance per turn is the same then it works!!! Again, wiki proves this!
A = V*L1*L2/(L1 + L2)
If L1 = L2 then we have
A = V/2*L!!!!
Which is exactly which one expects!
What is that? Voltage divider law? Same principle holds for resistors too, and capacitors? right? Get it now? (Note L really is X_L = jwL but in this case the magnitudes are identical except for the factor of w!!!!!! Or just think of the symbol L as a shorthand for X_L.. nifty huh?)
I know it's hard but think!!! Or you can just jump on the band wagon... I hear Phil "FUCKWIT" Allison is taking applications. (You just have to go around calling people Fuckwits and saying they are wrong and prove it by changing the hypothesis. Benji is doing a good job of that and I think larkin is taking notes.)
Waiting on Benji to reply and call me an asshole again. This time he probably won't even read a tenth of the post.
Been many years since I even thought of a transformer. I seem to remember something tricky about AUTO-transformers??
...Jim Thompson
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There actually are isolated VARIACs available (I have one), although in general you wouldn't want to that without testing it... Probably less than 5 VARIACs in 100 sold is isolated?
Apply your inductive voltage-divider "theory" to an autotransformer set anywhere else except at the halfway point - say, at the 1/3 point. Then the inductance of the short side is 1/4 of the long side (recall that L is proportional to the number of turns SQUARED). Therefore the output voltage should be 1/5 not 1/3. Where did you go wrong?
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