Hi!
I've been wrapping my head around the beautiful and magical workings of tuned circuits and everything about inductance and capacitance.
For a tuned circuit I understand (and btw. i'm specifically referring to parallel LC), that any combination of capacitor and inductor will have one and only one natural frequency. It is where the capacitive and inductive reactances (both measured in Ohm) for both L and C become equal.
So let's talk about an oscillator. I can select any inductor and capacitor and bam I get a nice sine wave at the appropriate frequency?
Let's take a "relatively" big capacitor of 0.1uF (0.0000001 F) with a tiny inductor of 0.0062 uH (0.0000000062 H), should I get a nice oscillator at 6.4 MHz?
Somehow I'm not so sure about this and very few sources on the web mention that the inductor and capacitor shall be matched so that the respective amount of energy they can each absorb is close to equal.
For example I don't think the wikipedia article talks about this (anybody want to expand on this?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LC_circuit
This finally brings me to the Q (quality) factor. Most websites refer to this in regards to how much energy is lost in the circuit (dampening). Very few sites actually talk about it referring to the bandwidth of the circuit.
So which is it or how can it be both?
In my case, the losses are negligible/irrelevant so I'm liking Q to describe the bandwidth.
I imagine if one were to use this to build an oscillator, one would want to have a very high Q as it would restrict the natural frequency as opposed to a low q (and high bandwidth), which would let the oscillator move around in frequency by much more.
So for the oscillator high Q means solid frequency, is that true?
Now, how do I achieve a high Q in my parallel LC oscillator?
Are we talking about 2 different kinds of Q (losses versus bandwidth)?
Is matching the energy of capacitor and inductor conducive to high Q or does that not have anything to do with it? In general, what actually happens when the energy of C and L are significantly unmatched? In which way does that affect the signal which is being generated?
As you can see I have a lot of questions and I would really like to understand this subject all the way.
I've been wrapping my head around the beautiful and magical workings of tuned circuits and everything about inductance and capacitance.
For a tuned circuit I understand (and btw. i'm specifically referring to parallel LC), that any combination of capacitor and inductor will have one and only one natural frequency. It is where the capacitive and inductive reactances (both measured in Ohm) for both L and C become equal.
So let's talk about an oscillator. I can select any inductor and capacitor and bam I get a nice sine wave at the appropriate frequency?
Let's take a "relatively" big capacitor of 0.1uF (0.0000001 F) with a tiny inductor of 0.0062 uH (0.0000000062 H), should I get a nice oscillator at 6.4 MHz?
Somehow I'm not so sure about this and very few sources on the web mention that the inductor and capacitor shall be matched so that the respective amount of energy they can each absorb is close to equal.
For example I don't think the wikipedia article talks about this (anybody want to expand on this?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LC_circuit
This finally brings me to the Q (quality) factor. Most websites refer to this in regards to how much energy is lost in the circuit (dampening). Very few sites actually talk about it referring to the bandwidth of the circuit.
So which is it or how can it be both?
In my case, the losses are negligible/irrelevant so I'm liking Q to describe the bandwidth.
I imagine if one were to use this to build an oscillator, one would want to have a very high Q as it would restrict the natural frequency as opposed to a low q (and high bandwidth), which would let the oscillator move around in frequency by much more.
So for the oscillator high Q means solid frequency, is that true?
Now, how do I achieve a high Q in my parallel LC oscillator?
Are we talking about 2 different kinds of Q (losses versus bandwidth)?
Is matching the energy of capacitor and inductor conducive to high Q or does that not have anything to do with it? In general, what actually happens when the energy of C and L are significantly unmatched? In which way does that affect the signal which is being generated?
As you can see I have a lot of questions and I would really like to understand this subject all the way.