A duty cycle is the time that an entity spends in an active state as a fraction of the total time under consideration. The term is often used pertaining to electrical devices, e.g., switching power supplies. It is also sometimes used pertaining to living systems such as the firing of action potentials by neurons. In an electrical device, a 60% duty cycle means the power is on 60% of the time and off 40% of the time. The "on time" for a 60% duty cycle could be a fraction of a second – or for say, irrigation pumps, days – depending on how long the device's period is. Here one period is the length of time it takes for the device to go through a complete on/off cycle. The term "duty cycle" has no agreed meaning for aperiodic devices.
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Famous quotes containing the words duty and/or cycle:
“A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If a singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way to escape, I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”
—Robert M. Pirsig (b. 1928)