LightSward
Flashlight Enthusiast
Nice job. Salt Water Submersion with fan you insulated is awesome..! Good work...I didn't think anything like this could work so well in salt water. Again nice work!
Did you sort of give up on this ever being a production design? Sounds like you might have leaned towards personal experimentation over the long run, possibly? Which I get, totally. A lot of production designs become quite harder to pursue, especially when some of us have never-ending OCD like tweaking natures of designs. Sometimes in our mind it's just never good enough to actually produce! Just another screw here and...wait, there too. What year is it again?
..............There is also another issue with Mercury/Xenon lamps; they have high open circuit voltage requirement and therefore not able to be driven by a small, lightweight, efficient power supply that could accept low voltage DC input. It would require 110AC/110VDC input just as the 850W Mercury, so you'd be tethered to an additional inverter power supply to utilize a low voltage 12-80 VDC power source when going portable rather than when stationary. It's a backwards topology.
This is an unrecognized advantage of pure Xenon; the low voltage DC operation is inherent and the conversion from high voltage AC/DC would not be needed when going portable with low voltage power source. It's also not the "nominal operating voltage" that's the issue, it's the lamp's "open circuit voltage". The 1600W lamp is perfect in this regard, with 75V (hot restart) boost phase requirement. The listed open circuit voltage for the XSTAGE 2000 is listed higher, but should in theory be even easier to start than the 1600W because the XSTAGE 2000 has the same nominal voltage and even smaller arc gap. Testing this would be the next step if determining to go with the XSTAGE 2000.
The total system weight with the 1600W Xenon (1150W to 1725W) would be 11 lbs. The total system weight with the 2000W XSTAGE (1610W-2530W) would be 12.5 lbs........................
My mind must have been somewhere else when I asked the question that resulted in the above answer. What I should have asked is if operating the 2000W Xstage lamp at 1610W continuously would result in the early buildup/darkening/electrode destruction? I know you've stated that's an acceptable power level within the range cited but are there any negatives in doing so?Operating Xenons under their rated range will very quickly destroy the electrodes. I gather because when under-driven, electron flow is not enough to carry heat away.