Joule Thief

[innovation_station]

eyes closed easy! i hope for it to open a few 



w

[jadaro2600]

I made a few changes to some of my setups and noticed that when my LED is in the ( red configuration ) upper position, the total consumption of the circuit is 40% less milliamps ( running at 5.4ma rather than what it would be in the blue position... @8.9ma ...  I think this worthy to share, as the LED lights up just as bright as it would in either position yet it uses less miliamps.

Make a note that when the transistor is OFF and the mag field is collapsing, the voltage allows the LED to short the path from positive through coil to ground ( in the blue position ).. this does NOT occur in the RED path, as the only means to ground is through the transistor and out of the base.

This setup ( red ) removes any current taking a path to ground except via means of the transistor gate!

[DreamThinkBuild]

@Gadgetmall, Keep up the good work, I'm interested in seeing the results of your final circuit. Ultracaps seem the way to go for pulse heating/charging. I found this paper interesting

http://web.ing.puc.cl/~power/paperspdf/dixon/tesis/PhDOrtuzar.pdf

"...Ultracapacitors have greater specific power (more than 1.5kW/kg) than conventional or advanced batteries; and higher specific energy (of about 3 to 5 Wh/kg) than aluminum electrolytic capacitors (Dietrich, 2001; Burke and Miller, 2002). Their advantage over batteries, in terms of power, is due to their reduced equivalent series resistance (ESR) and that in these elements, unlike batteries, there are no chemical reactions involved in the process of charge and discharge. Therefore, the speed needed to deliver energy does not depend on the speed of such reactions or the ability of chemical components to recombine, but on electrostatic phenomena, which does not require molecular mutation to take place. Also, the longer cycle life and good behavior at low temperatures (Schneuwly and Smith, 2005) are important advantages..."


@Powercat, I would also like to know the best way to run ultracaps off a battery bank. I use solar for all my charging which is fed to an inverter which is then run out to 2 banks of small battery chargers of 16 AA batteries which are used for lighting at night. During full sunlight the panels act as alternators, the battery bank voltage barely goes down, so it's pretty much free wasted energy. If this could be fed into a ultracap bank to run a pulse heater that would greatly cut heating costs during the day.

[Pirate88179]

As far as using banks of these devices, as Gadget has said previously, these Bcaps have a main advantage over a regular supercap in that you can put as many in series, or parallel as you want to in order to gain the power or volts output you require.  Regular supercaps are limited in this type of configuration..I would have to check but I believe you can only series or parallel 2 or 3 of them and that is it.

Great devices these things.

Bill

[PaulLowrance]

BTW, just out of curiosity, has anyone measured the energy contained in one of these ultracaps?  Dr. Stiffler was just showing us detailed professional measurements of 3 farad supercaps. The measured capacitance was no where near what the manufacture claims, and the measured capacitance actually differs depending on the testing method, strangely enough. These are not the bcaps that gadget uses, but maybe they have the same issue, possibly worse.

Regards,
Paul