Nixie tube lifetime

Lifetime would depend on the brightness that you have them operate at, regulated by the current available when the elements are lit, not just when igniting them. If my memory serves: the nixie tubes are neon discharge lamps with the elements selected to fire specific elements that make up the characters. FYI: I have a frequency counter tha I built in the mid '60s and it is still functional using the 7 segment nixie display tubes. Personally for your application there should not be any concern regarding them burning out but just in case you can always get a few extra tubes as a backup. "Boris Gjenero" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

I have built three clocks using B-7971 displays. All of them have been working continuously for more than 100,000 hours. YMMV.

Have you checked out the NEONIXIIE group on Yahoo! Groups?

Thanks for pointing me to that group. There's a lot of useful information there.

Nixie tubes last forever (for all practical purposes) if you dont missuse them

One can probably double the lifetime by clocking the segments at a 50% duty cycle at about 30 times per second.

Once when reading about someone's nixie clock I read that multiplexing wears out nixie tubes faster. I thought that the higher currents necessary to get the desired brightness were probably the cause. Because of this I was planning an unmultiplexed design.

So is multiplexing good or bad? Can someone confirm this?

I'd expect that brightness and inverse-lifetime would both follow the average current through a neon bulb. Anybody got data?

If inverse-lifetime is linear with brightness, then multiplexing doesn't make any difference as long as you keep the brightness the same. That assumes that brightness is linear with current.

Is there a word/term for inverse-lifetime? I'm looking for something like resistance vs conductance.