Hi MrAl,
I still don't think that the concept of circuit Q at an off resonant frequency means anything
Ratch
Hi again Ratch,
Well there is a difference between thinking and knowing. In one case you have proof, in the other case you still dont know. What i dont understand here though is how you could quote a passage that actually uses this concept and provides a useful result, then state that you are still thinking about if it means anything.
What reliable source did I quote? During the discussion in this thread, we postulated about the Q at an off resonance frequency. I stated that I could not find anything in the literature about this concept. So please, point out the quoted passage that gives this principle legitimacy.
Q=1/(1/QL+1/QC)
is not resonant specific, and yet it provides a useful result. Yes it could be in a resonant circuit, but each individual Q is based on the frequency of operation which may or may not be at a resonant frequency. But even if we dont consider anything other than the resonant frequency we still are facing the concept of calculating the individual Q's at several frequencies, which we dont have to take as being any resonant point.
There might be several resonant points, and each point will have its own Q.
To state this a little more clearly:
Q(w)=1/(1/QL(w)+1/QC(w))
however we may want to know say QL(w) for several frequencies.
Fine, they can be calculated.
If we design a filter with two parts, each part may operate at a different 'resonant' frequency. Since they are both in the same circuit however, the overall Q during either resonant point will be of concern because that will be the Q of the whole circuit, and there will always be one part that is not operating at any resonant point even when one point is.
Parts of a circuit may resonant at different frequencies. There will be a particular Q at each resonant part of the circuit. Therefore, there cannot be one overall Q for the whole circuit by reason that each resonant Q is only relevant at it own frequency.
This is partly why i suggested that you do a few numerical experiments and see what you can find out. If you arent sure about something, go ahead and try to find out for sure. Discovery can be as interesting as book learning, and often more.
Before I do anything like that, I need more guidance and purpose on what I would be trying to prove.
Ratch
Hi,
I think i understand now why you are not seeing this for it's simplicity.
A quick analogy would be adding series resistors to get the total resistance:
RT=R1+R2+R3
Does it make sense to do this? Sure it does. But what if each resistor could somehow change in value with frequency? Still makes sense to do it:
RT(f)=R1(f)+R2(f)+R3(f)
but what stands out is that each resistance is independent of each other resistance, so we dont really have to keep adding all three if we know that two of them add up to say 5. If we know even one of them, we dont have to keep calculating the whole bunch. Say we only know R3 at 100Hz equals 10 ohms. Then we reduce it to:
RT(100)=R1(100)+R2(100)+10
If we knew that R2(100) was equal to 20, we could reduce this to:
RT(100)=R1(100)+30
Maybe this doesnt work out, so we try anther resistor to replace R1:
RT(100)=R4(100)+30
The whole point here is that we did not have to keep calculating the values of R2 and R3 over and over because they are independent of one another
As for the circuit with two parts and two resonant points, if we had the SEPARATE data for each part of the circuit, maybe we could combine them without having to calculate the Q for the entire circuit twice by means of doing the entire calculation over again. So if we knew that circuit 1 was 10 and the calculated circuit 2 as 20, we might be able to calculate the total Q for the two frequencies just knowing the Q at those two frequencies for both sections. This means we could combine sections without constantly calculating both parts, only the part that we changed.
For a single inductor and capacitor, we have:
QT=1/(1/QL+1/QC)
and so we could try different C's for example, all the while knowing QL, and so we dont have to keep calculating the Q of the entire circuit with both elements.
What could be done is simply calculate some Q's of some circuits, then combine them, calculate the total Q, then try to see if you can find a way to combine the individual Q's in order to arrive at the total Q.
If we did this with the L and C we would end up with the formula above. It may be more complicated with more complicated sub circuits, but you could find that out. I realize it takes some work here, but that's what we do :-)
We could also do a search :-)