Hi Monte!
This one is running on what used to be my nightstand. Yep, there's nothing quite so soothing as clicking and rumbling bearings when you need to fall asleep. heh.
This one is using about 350uf (2 photoflash capacitors) rated at 400v each. The pulse rate is about 4hz. Why? Well, if you look at Bedini's charger patent, it says to keep the capacitors near the 20v range for max efficiency for each pulse. The less capacitance you have, the higher the voltage will rise between commutator pulses. I just built the commutator with 4 copper strips (cut from a scrap pipe) and then put caps on to see how high the voltage would climb on them between pulses. Turns out I only needed two caps on this one.
The Bedini and Adam's motors are two different creatures. I'm not going to go into the differences because others have done it elsewhere.
Take a real good look at the stator winding. What you have there is a 1:1 transformer.
Under "normal" use as a transformer, if you hit the primary with a 12v sinewave, put a full-wave bridge on the secondary, and then charged an electrolytic capacitor, you'd have 12VDC on the cap, maximum. If you put a resistive load across the cap, like small bulb, you'd see the primary side current draw increase as the bulb draws the cap charge down below 12v.
That much is conventional transformer theory.
This motor something different. An incoming magnet generates a postitive sine which does no work except activating the base of the transistor.
The transistor switches the pimary battery on just as the magnet reaches TDC, and creates a "null" in the field interactions, allowing the magnet to float past TDC as if the stator isn't there.
Due to the slight delay in the transformer action, it takes a tiny fraction of a second for the feedback winding's output to invert to negative, clamping the transistor OFF.
The magnet's field once again tries to reach out for the stator and THIS action does two things.
- Voltage is a function of FLUX VELOCITY, CORE PERMEABILITY and NUMBER OF TURNS. So, the re-expanding magnetic field from the rotor magnet SLAMS into the core at nearly the speed of light. This generates an extremely high voltage that is WAY above primary battery voltage. This pulse EASILY fills a capacitor above primary voltage. Once the cap is above that primary voltage, the only current used from the primary is for field nullification. Nothing more.
- That capacitive LOADING on the secondary causes the stator core to develop a counter EM field that resists the incoming PM field from the DEPARTING rotor magnet, giving it an elastic SHOVE away from the stator.
In a nutshell, as long as your collection capacitor is NEVER DRAWN LOWER THAN PRIMARY BATTERY VOLTAGE, the stator winding arrangement effectively isolates the primary from the secondary and you don't need to worry about timing your output pulses against primary input pulses. The fact that your motor/gen gives you nothing but CEMF to work with in the secondary means the primary side will never notice ANYTHING that you do with the cap charge, UNLESS you draw that cap lower than primary voltage.
Once you get yours going, Get a small fan-blade and put it on the main rotor. Then watch what happens to your primary input power. Oh, ok, I'll just tell you. The input power drops as you load up the output shaft.
Sounds a little counter-intuitive. But, it's not. Just don't load it down so much that you stall it out. Every motor is different. This needs to be mechanically loaded the same way you load an IC engine with a fixed throttle, like a lawnmower. You can only cut so much at a time without binding and stalling. Same thing with the Bedini system.
Make sure you posts some pics when you get it finished!
