David Bowling's Continuous Charging Device

[fletcher]

That sounds very sensible zerotensor.

[seekingknowledge]

Stefan, where would we have the sparkgap with a conventional dc motor? are we able to have it without taking the motor apart, do we need to connect and disconnect the power rapidly like the newman machine? like have the circuit that goes via a plywood disk connected to the motor that rotates and has segments to disconnect the power rapidly to the motor, it wood only have to be in one direction because the commutator inside the motor would take care of the rest.

And on that note i will just say i did something simler once just as a quick experiment to see if the motor would get rotation , and it did but was slower then what it was with a normal connection and the same power supply obviously because of the constant disconnection, but god there were some sparks let me tell you but the experiments stoped there, it was only a very small 6v motor to which i had a plastic bottle top on the end of the sharft and a peice of wire that looped around it which had the 8 segments connected to it which they themsleves were a just a piece of wire, one brush connected from one terminal of the battery to the loop of wire and another brush (which was held by my hand) then connected the segments to one of the motors terminal while the other terminal of the motor just had a normal connection to the other terminal of the battery.

[Doug1]

  Yes it does work. This is the experiment that got me started down this endless path to begin with.
   I used a 24 volt dc motor from a Merits wheel chair and ran it off a 12 volt deep cycle battery with a charge of 11 volts. No motor load because the battery was drained very low and half the voltage the motor was rated for. I was at the time more exited by the thing then over any other event in my life.
  Timing the device was the hardest part. The inside commutator was left alone but used for reference to build the external commutator which was made simple by taking the braking disc that came with the motor and applying fat pieces of wire onto the flat surface spaced evenly and slightly off alignment slightly compared to the inside commutator segments. The disc was built up with Elmers glue until the wires were completely covered and then it was sanded down to expose the wires so they could be used as contacts as the motor spun. Aluminum strips #4 were placed so as to make contact and feed the the power from the battery in short pulses to the motor internal commutator. The second set of contacts were used to pick up the back emf and spark event which was isolated through timing back to the single battery 12vdc. It often reached over 125v on the battery terminals using an ordinary volt meter. After three of the longest most boring days of my life watching this set up run with periods of varying battery voltages ranging from 11.5v to 125.v I turned it off the wife was getting pissed.
  The spark gap thing does work but it also has a short life because the sparks are eating your contact materials which throws the timing off slightly requiring adjustments. I did not consider using two batteries because i did not have any faith it would work to begin with partly because of the crude construct secondly because it just did not seem possible.
   And so the path from hell began with a pile of parts from an old farts wheel chair.
It would be nice to try it with a golf cart motor only next time I would maybe not use so much junk or make it look nicer or something. The sparks change color at times in conjunction with the voltage readings mostly this was seen at night. If you think you can watch paint dry for 36 hours straight, enjoy.

[zerotensor]

If my calculations are correct, there are about 1260 watts of power in the batteries I am using (4 18 Ah batteries and one 33 AH battery) and I only accounted for 990 watts used up by the light bulb, so not very impressive so far. The rest of the power could easily have been used up by the motor, which ran for nine hours during the testing. So maybe the thing doesn't work and I used up all the watts available.

David:

It seems that you are confusing energy, power, and capacity.  This can get complicated when you are dealing with chemical batteries.  Stick to what you can show.  Here's a simple experiment you could perform which may help to illuminate what is going on:

Get 6 fresh, identical batteries.  Do your discharge thing with two of them. Set-up your device with two of the good batteries and one dead, just like before.  Now, separately, wire up the remaining three batteries , using a length of wire in place of the motor.  Test both setups with identical loads.

Without knowing the actual details of your circuit, I can't say for certain that this test would make sense, but if it does, this should provide us with a qualitative demonstration of the effect, if it exists.

Voltage and current measurements are nice and all, but if you really have something here you should be able to demonstrate it clearly without getting into the messy quantitative stuff.  I don't care about the voltage and the current readings-- those can be misleading.  Show us the energy!  The quantitative measurements can be made in a university lab once the viability of the technique has been clearly demonstrated.

I strongly recommend that you disclose the circuit as soon as possible.  Forget the "black box" gambit, unless it is your intention to turn-off serious interest and label yourself a charlatan.  (There will no doubt be more than enough of that, anyway).

[hartiberlin]

Stefan, where would we have the sparkgap with a conventional dc motor? are we able to have it without taking the motor apart, do we need to connect and disconnect the power rapidly like the newman machine? like have the circuit that goes via a plywood disk connected to the motor that rotates and has segments to disconnect the power rapidly to the motor, it wood only have to be in one direction because the commutator inside the motor would take care of the rest.

And on that note i will just say i did something simler once just as a quick experiment to see if the motor would get rotation , and it did but was slower then what it was with a normal connection and the same power supply obviously because of the constant disconnection, but god there were some sparks let me tell you but the experiments stoped there, it was only a very small 6v motor to which i had a plastic bottle top on the end of the sharft and a peice of wire that looped around it which had the 8 segments connected to it which they themsleves were a just a piece of wire, one brush connected from one terminal of the battery to the loop of wire and another brush (which was held by my hand) then connected the segments to one of the motors terminal while the other terminal of the motor just had a normal connection to the other terminal of the battery.

It depends on what kind of DC motor you use.
A standard 12 Volts car motor as was used in this case might have already have some
bad brushes contacts as the graphite brushes have been worn out
and this way it is sparking at the commutator.
This way you get the desired effect.
But surely you will improve it, if you make the brush?s tips smaller than the copper
segments gap length, so every time the graphite tip comes to a copper gap, it fires
the BackEMF from the coils of the DC motor.

Hope this helps.