I think I see it now: I have some wire and a good amount of vinyl ester left over from my first alternator... I'm going to have to build another one. (And I'm not going to ask if this cycle ever ends!) What I'd like to do is make an alternator that will cost less than the $200 45 watt Harbor Freight solar panels. To do that, I need to stretch the magnet budget some; googling, it looks like an overlapping coil design can make do with half the magnets; the downside is that the stator needs to be thicker -
When I searched the site I saw that overlapping coils are usually shown laid down at an angle on the previous one. That makes the stator 3x the thickness of an individual coil.
Can't they just be laid down on top of each other (like I show at the bottom of the drawing.)
I can see that in the "angled" case the that the coil (in effect) moves up an down in the gap as the magnets rotate but that each of the three coils in a leg are getting the same flux at the same time.
In see that in the "flat" coil case that flux in one of the coil in a leg will be slightly different as it will be a little closer (and alternatively slightly farther away) from the magnet pole than the other two coils would be. But won't the voltages in each still add up?
I like the idea of laying out the "flat" coils because I've seen how a narrower gap makes a huge difference in the power generated... I just don't know if it's a bonehead idea or not!
Thank you very much,
- Ed.