|
|
|
|
Capacitive Discharge. What the heck is that? In simplest terms, it means that rather than trying to source the firing current necessary to reliably ignite an ematch from the control console (like the majority of Pyrotechnic systems tend to do), we store the required energy right at the Firing Module where the ematches are attached. So what? Well, without getting into the laws of physics and all that, here's the deal. The longer the path from the energy source that will be providing the current needed to ignite the ematch to the ematch itself, the more resistance is accumulated in the firing path. Resistance in the firing path to the ematch reduces the amount of energy available to ignite the ematch. Less energy means at some point you have to become concerned with the overall length of the wire between the energy source and the ematch, the number of ematches you have in series or parallel to that particular cue and so on. There are a few pyrotechnic systems that even supply you with formulas (!!) to help you determine if their system will indeed be able to fire the ematches for a particular run. How does Capacitive Discharge fix this for me? In a very elegant way. What we do is during the initial power-up of the Firing Modules, we are in fact charging some very large capacitors contained in each Firing Module. As these capacitors charge, they are in effect becoming remote sources of the energy that will be used to fire the ematches attached to each Firing Module. Once the Firing Modules have been charged, hardware, software and communication diagnostics are run on each Firing Module and then they are individually checked by the Catalyst Control Console to make sure they are able to perform the task at hand... reliably firing the ematches. The energy needed to fire the ematch is now right at the Firing Module, not hundreds or thousands of feet away at the Control Console. In this manner, the only wire the firing energy has to travel is the ematch wire itself! How much energy is stored? How about enough energy to simultaneously fire all 32 cues/ematches at the same moment? Not good enough? OK, how about the energy needed to simultaneously fire all 32 cues with an ematch attached is slightly less than 1 joule²? Not specific enough? Our CD system stores worst-case¹ around 9 joules and typically stores about 15-20 joules. Overkill? Sure. Do we care? Nope! Not to mention that all the Firing Modules continue to charge and recharge the CD system during the show. Yeah, overkill. Gotta love it!
But that's dangerous, I can't totally power-down my system from my console. Yeah, that's the best excuse that the wanna-be's have for not using CD technology. In fact, the CD system requires you to go further in thinking safety. The Firing Modules have several active and also several passive design innovations that are strictly there to prevent accidental discharge, whether the Firing Module is active and powered up or powering down. A basic fact is that it requires a number of circuits to correctly function in concert to fire a cue and there is no single failure that will cause an accidental discharge of energy to a cue. There's the key term, no single point of failure. At any rate, once you power-down the Catalyst Control Console, the Firing Modules are designed to self-discharge within 15-25 seconds. ¹-- Worst case example would be something like a Firing Module located at the end of a 600ft 18gauge wire, after passing through over 1500ft of 16ga and 14ga wire with over 25+ Firing Modules along the way, each Firing Module connected to the next one using 5ft of 24ga wire. (Not actually THE worst case, but a pretty extreme example at any rate. The Catalyst System will handle considerably longer wire runs than this, but proper use of larger gauge wire limits the problems we tried to setup in the stated example.) ²-- 1 joule = the energy generated when 1 ampere of electrical current, passes through an electrical potential drop of 1 volt. Power = Volts x Current. 1 watt (of power) = 1 joule/second. So joules is a quantity of energy, and watts is the RATE of generation of energy. |
|
Send mail to Catalyst-Pyro@BizzyBitz.com with questions or comments about
this web site.
|
The heart of the CD energy storage system in the Firing Modules