Beginners frustration
I had a ceiling fan on a 10' pipe turning in the wind just to work the bugs out before trying to make it generate but the nut that was securing it vibrated off and it came crashing down braking all but one blade.
I put a wanted ceiling fans for parts in Craig's List and the very next day I ended up with 9 ceiling fans for $10. I had planned on converting an induction motor as my firs try at making a generator but now that I had all these ceiling fans I thought why not try that first.
I had 10 neo magnets ½ x ½ x 1/4 and I thought 8 of them should line up with one of the fans that had 16 coils and if I used the rotor out of the larger one that fell that would almost give me 1/4 inch clearance for 1/4" magnets. I would only have to turn about .035" off the inside diameter which I did.
The fan that had the 16 coils was now .was now on the pole spinning in the wind and I had another smaller fan stator with 14 coils so I thought I would just try in in the rotor with the 8 neo's cemented in. 4 of the poles lined up with the magnets and 4 didn't. At 600 rpm in my lathe it put out 6.3VAC. I figgured that the magnets that didn't line up were canceling the others and that was why I was getting such low voltage.
I then took the other fan down from the pole with the 16 coil stator and put it into the rotor with the 8 magnets thought now I will get some real voltage out of it. I spun it on my lathe at 600 rpm and much to my disappointment it only put out 4.9VAC on the inner set of coils and 2VAC on the outer set of coils.
Where did I go wrong? Did I use the wrong number of magnets? Was the ..015" gap to small?
It did cog badly. I had thought of cementing the magnets at an angle but they were ½" x ½" and it didn't look too practical. If they had been 3/4" or 1" long I would have slanted them.
For pictures of these two different stators see my picture postings "two different stators"
AT.
Thumbs, here is that photo:
TW