The Magneformer-lenzless transformer ?

[Newton II]

@MH-and all

I am going to start from the begining.....

I you wind the wire in a zig - zag manner as seen in your picture, you won't get good results.  The flux produced in individual turns may not add up properly.  Better if you remove a coil from old small generator or a 6 Watts / 12 watts eleminator (rectifier) which will have a small step down transformer in it.    You can see how neatly the individual turns sit one above the other in correct alignment.

[tinman]

I you wind the wire in a zig - zag manner as seen in your picture, you won't get good results.  The flux produced in individual turns may not add up properly.  Better if you remove a coil from old small generator or a 6 Watts / 12 watts eleminator (rectifier) which will have a small step down transformer in it.    You can see how neatly the individual turns sit one above the other in correct alignment.

Hi Newton
For the purpose of the demondstration,the coils dont have to be neat,as the same loss(if any) will be encountered with and without the magnets in place.
Some time ago,a member here that knows his stuff,said you would only get back 50% at best !on the kickback! to what you put in. As you can see from the result's(which are very accurate),we are getting back 76.08% from the device-even with the messy hand wound coils. But even so,i would have to disagree that neat windings make for a better performance-in regards to these type of systems.I have unwound many inductors,and wound the wire back on neat,and never have i seen a performance increase. Infact i believe messy wound coils are better in this type of system,due to the increased capacitance of the coil.

[Farmhand]

Hi Newton
For the purpose of the demondstration,the coils dont have to be neat,as the same loss(if any) will be encountered with and without the magnets in place.
Some time ago,a member here that knows his stuff,said you would only get back 50% at best !on the kickback! to what you put in. As you can see from the result's(which are very accurate),we are getting back 76.08% from the device-even with the messy hand wound coils. But even so,i would have to disagree that neat windings make for a better performance-in regards to these type of systems.I have unwound many inductors,and wound the wire back on neat,and never have i seen a performance increase. Infact i believe messy wound coils are better in this type of system,due to the increased capacitance of the coil.

Hi Tinman. Boost converters use the flyback or inductive discharge and can be over 90% efficient, so I don't get how a knowledgeable person could say we would get 50% back at most, I have a boost converter which can be over 90% efficient. In my opinion neat wound coils are better because they are more uniform and repeatable to closer values.

The trick is to reduce losses by keeping DC resistance to a minimum Thick wire and as least as is needed, also using good core material and diodes with proper clean switching.
Generally I use 1 mm magnet wire on iron powder cores for high frequency inductors, I parallel it for transformer primaries side by side to make flat conductors. For a primary coil or an RF inductor I never use less than 1 mm of wire, sometimes I use multiple strands of 0.5 twisted.

As the paper I linked shows, more turns does not mean more magnetic flux intensity so I don't buy into the more turns are always better for magnets argument, I would argue less losses are the key, as little loss as is possible. When building a transformer the primary coil needs to have a certain amount of turns for the core size for it to work so that it can idle with small input. Cancelling he self induction and so forth is good but it cannot nullify DC resistance losses.

A very interesting phenomenon exists when we draw current from the secondary. Since the primary current increases to supply the load, we would expect that the magnetic flux in the core would also increase (more amps, same number of turns, more flux). In fact, the flux density decreases!

I do agree if the one coil is used it can be wound however, it stays the same so it does not matter. If I was winding coils for a multi coil boost converter I would wind them as neat as is possible for me for practical purposes, so they can be made the same.

An electro-magnet could be excited by an all positive or all negative "Sine" type or sine looking wave couldn't it ?

My toroid with four transformers on it has thousands of tuns side by side neatly wound by hand, I put a layer of wax paper between each layer of turns.

Cheers

[MileHigh]

Brad:

Looking at your scope shots in reply #61 it looks like your current waveform is upside down.  Not a big deal, sometimes inverting a signal on your scope compensates for the "backwards" voltage you might see because of the where the scope ground reference is relative to the probe.

From the top level view you can see that the impedance of the circuit drops and the power consumption goes up when you add the magnet.  So there is more power to go around.

Also, the coupling to your secondary may explain the relatively low efficiency of the circuit.  Ideally you would mate end-on to the laminations for the secondary for both the primary and the magnet.  Instead, you are connecting to the flat tops of the laminations and there are small insulating gaps between each layer.  So the magnetic circuit to the secondary could be relatively poorly coupled.

If you are curious enough, and perhaps for your own satisfaction, with the aid of your digital scope you could make a full timing diagram for the two cases, without the magnet and with the magnet.  If you are good with an image editing program it would be fairly easy to do.  You could take screen captures of all of the signals and then paste them into a large composite image, one on top of the other, everything lined up in time.  You do it for the voltages and the currents on the primary and the secondary, and for the flyback energy collection, with and without the magnet.

You are only looking at less than one-half of the picture right now.  If you were to consider doing it, do it for the resistor only as the load on the secondary.  Forget about the capacitor and keep it simple.

Once you have a complete set of timing diagrams for the two cases, then look at the waveforms and explain and understand what they mean.  It may sound tedious and like it's a lot of work and it is.

MileHigh

[MileHigh]

Just a few more comments about the setup.  Again let's start with a resistor as the secondary load to keep things simple.

Everything I discuss below can be considered to be duplicated so you test for the two cases, without the magnet and with the magnet.

For starters, you could put a 100 Hz, and a 1 KHz sine wave into the primary and scope the unloaded secondary to measure your turns ratio.

Note when you energize the primary with the square wave driving the transistor input this is what is considered to be a pulse circuit.  You pulse the primary on and then disconnect from it and then collect the remaining back-EMF energy in the primary coil.

So if you first try with no load on the secondary, the overall circuit load relative to the power supply looks like an inductance.  You should see a relatively slowly rising current waveform.  That's the rising part of the triangle wave.  The slope of that waveform tells you the inductance of the circuit.

Interestingly, when you add a load resistor to the secondary.  That also causes a linearly rising current waveform on the primary.  So that would  tend to imply that your actual observed slope is some combination of the slop due to the inductance plus the slope due to the load resistance.  That suggests that the lower the load resistance on the secondary, the steeper the slope of the current waveform on the primary.

Naturally your transformer will have a coefficient of coupling associated with it, but I don't know a quick and easy way to test for that.

If you look at the circuit and make tests and measurements with some kind of strategy like I state above, it can all be figured out and understood.  To understand what is really going on, you need a suite of test vectors, and not just one isolated measurement.  As suite of measurements allow you to see trends as variables change and stuff like that.

MileHigh