David Bowling's Continuous Charging Device

[xee]

David,
Can you post the model numbers of the motors that worked and didn't work here? Maybe someone can provide information about what might be the differences in them.

[Linearfashion]

Great determination David! I was wondering if maybe there is something to do with motor rpm. Perhaps your more powerful motor was spinning to slow. Maybe a tacometer should be added to your arsenel. If frequency of the sparking has something to do with it, that could be fine tuned with a tach. Good Luck

[zerotensor]

I just hooked up my whole system using the old, less powerful motor I used on the first day, and now it's working right again. I hooked up the motor I was using this weekend and it doesn't work right. SO apparently something went on inside the motor that screwed me up. Possibly wearing out the brushes with all that sparking. I don't know. But once again I am able to charge a battery and the voltage in my main batteries either stays the same or increases, and the motor runs the whole time. I will be charging up four batteries now and then discharging them through the Kill-A-Watt to see how many hours of power they put out. And doing it again and again. Kilowat hours of electricity is the "standard" my electrical engineer friend wanted to see.

@DB:
This is very encouraging!  This seems to support the idea that the sparking commutator in the motor is the key, as Stefan eruditely noted.  Bravo, David, for your perseverance.  Looking forward to your results.

Yes, at the end of the day, kW-hours is an appropriate standard-- this is a unit of energy.  Your previous discussion of "Wattage" made no sense to me.   A Watt is a unit of power-- energy per unit time.  Confusing energy and power is a common mistake among beginners, probably because the two terms are often used interchangeably in casual English.  You probably already knew this, but anyway, I hope this clarifies the terminology a bit.

[hartiberlin]

I just hooked up my whole system using the old, less powerful motor I used on the first day, and now it's working right again. I hooked up the motor I was using this weekend and it doesn't work right. SO apparently something went on inside the motor that screwed me up. Possibly wearing out the brushes with all that sparking. I don't know. But once again I am able to charge a battery and the voltage in my main batteries either stays the same or increases, and the motor runs the whole time. I will be charging up four batteries now and then discharging them through the Kill-A-Watt to see how many hours of power they put out. And doing it again and again. Kilowat hours of electricity is the "standard" my electrical engineer friend wanted to see.

Hi David,
great to hear, that your old motor still works.
Yes, please do a Wattshour tests.
Only this can tell, how much energy was being stored in the batteries.

It really depends on the sparking of the commutator.
Maybe your newer motor has a small capacitor build in to suppress the sparking ?
Try to remove the cap, if there is one.
Good luck.

Regards, Stefan.

[hartiberlin]

Hi David,
it also depends a lot, in which angle the commutator is fixed to the axis shaft.
That way you can control , when the motor windings are energized and
released again from the power input.

If you turn and fix the commutator slightly back or forth on the axis,
you can control how much the motor works also as a generator..

Maybe you first motor was  better in this case, that the manufacturer
had setup the commutator a bit false or too late rotation wise, so the BackEMF bursts had
more power in it, due to a better energizing from the rotating permanent magnets inside the motor.

If you have a coil?s current cut and the BackEMF voltage happening and the
spark jumping
and at the same a magnet inducing a changing magnet field into the coil,
the BackEMF voltage does get a real good "push" so to say and the
energy in this BackEMF spike increases dramatically.

Now this combined with burning the graphite at the spark which puts out  the
additional energy inside the motor commutator  adds more energy into the
whole circuit.

Regards, Stefan.