What's so 'hard' about dump loads? Hook up some resistors and GHurd's controller and walk away. Set it and forget it. Where's the 'fight' in that?
Excessive ponderance of the plumbing.
Thats my story and I am sticking with it.
Tom
"Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned."--Mark Twain[ Parent ]
If you replace the pm rotor with a standard one you will need to supply about 40W to the field. That is 40W gone before you produce anything. If you can tolerate that then you can use the wound rotor.
The internal regulator is a more serious issue, it works by reducing field to maintain constant charging voltage. Firstly you will have trouble sensing that voltage on the end of a long line so you will limit voltage at the alternator and the line resistance will drop your charge rate right down. More seriously the regulator will shed load from the alternator and unless your prop has a pitch control mechanism or air brake it will run wild, become incredibly noisy and likely dangerous.
Like the others I can't see any problem with a dump regulator. What you want to do is possible but will involve far more work, less output and serious risks unless you control the unloaded speed.
Flux[ Parent ]
The biggest issues are space, reliability and simplicity/cost. It actually would take less $$$ to convert a standard alternator with just a finer stator than it takes to convert to PMA, so savings there. Don't have the expense of a dump load and don't have to get rid of the heat. Heat can be great when it is -10F but when it's 110F, it's really hard to keep your load cool, and your fan fails, so does your load, batteries overvolt, cook, done. If the alternator were to fail, 99 times out of 100 they just quit putting out power instead of overvolting.[ Parent ]
I KNEW something like that was coming!
Use wire that is too thick and your voltage drops... takes 2 cycles to flush all of those electrons don't-ya-know. Classic problem. Happens to me all the time, especially at remote locations.
Is that too much of a stretch?[ Parent ]
