Generator Car

When you spin a top, you give it kinetic energy that is slowly lost due to air resistance and friction, but what if you could also give it another form of energy to help it spin longer? This video is sponsored by kiwo. More on them later in a few years. A while ago I came across a video posted by Laser Saber and he built a motor that works almost like a perpetual motion machine. This motor had a rotating disc with magnets and 12 coils mounted around the perimeter and by blowing through a straw you could spin the wheel up to SP speed and the motor would seemingly spin forever and then turn off and walk away, isn't that a beautiful thing now?

Of course, it's not perpetual motion, hence the almost and eventually stops in the title, but it used a really interesting concept that I want to try out myself and see if it can be adapted to power a car with the lightsaber engine. He used 42 gauge copper wire which is incredibly thin, about the same diameter as a human hair and almost the same color as mine, but this copper wire is much weaker than human hair as I can break it with very little force. , so it will be fun to solder it to make the coils. I made this reel seat so I wouldn't have to keep turning it. and I 3D printed these coil holders so I could wind the coils using my drill, which I'm glad I didn't have to wind by hand, so after winding a few more coils I had to solder them, which wasn't easy, but after several frustrations.

During the hours I built this prototype test motor, this motor has a disc with magnets attached and coils mounted in an axial flux configuration, which basically means two on each side of the rotor and when each magnet passes through the coils, a Perfectly synchronized pulse of electricity generates a coil. to repel the magnet and the other to attract it now this pulse of electricity must be precisely timed or the motor could spin backwards or not spin at all and this timing is controlled by a small component called a readout switch. A readout switch has two thin metal arms inside a glass capsule and when a magnet is near the switch the two arms attract each other and make contact allowing current to flow through the circuit and as you can imagine, The position of this readout switch is very important to determine how well the motor runs now, in theory this motor should also work as a

generator

if I spin the wheel by hand, so here I have connected a capacitor to the input of the motor which as you can see from my voltmeter is completely discharged so if I spin the motor by hand it should act as a

generator

and charge the capacitor but watch what happens once the voltage reaches its point maximum on the capacitor, it starts to discharge and this is because the voltage on the capacitor is now higher than that which is generated in the coils and therefore the capacitor is now powering the motor, so if I do Spinning the wheel at high speed, the capacitor charges while storing energy, then automatically switches from a generator to a motor and runs continuously for several minutes.

Now this same effect could be achieved with a heavy flywheel and low friction bearings or even just a well tuned top, but what they can't do is slow us down to a complete stop and automatically spin up to speed once released, so what I'm thinking about is designing a tricycle style. vehicle that can run on this engine to see if it can travel further than a freewheeling car once pushed on a surface because I want this car to be as simple and efficient as possible. I'm going to use the motor as the front wheel. So there will be a series of coils mounted around the front axle and then I can mount magnets on the wheel that will hopefully drive it and since the motor is the main wheel to drive the car, I 3D printed it on my previous XL. due to their tool change which allowed me to use rigid pla for the wheel hub and a flexible tpu material for the tire which should give it some grip like a real car so i spent about a day rolling and soldering all of these coils.

There are six, put them on this side of the wheel. I actually haven't put the coils on the other side of the wheel yet, and the reason for this is because I don't think this car is going to run if I spin this. to charge the capacitor and then stop it, it runs like the test motor, but it's nowhere near the speed and it's also nowhere near enough torque, even with these wheels on the back, there's no way for that to power itself, even with my tabletop power supply. connected, so it is powered by an external source, uh, it almost moves when I put enough voltage on it, but it doesn't have enough torque to run the car, so what I'm thinking is to redesign the car with a gear ratio to requiring fewer coils.

While it is expected to produce more torque at the wheel, this version two of the car also has a tricycle design and was designed in forma, which is a cloud-based CAD program that runs in your browser and which you can try out by checking out the link in the description. Next also with a total of eight coils instead of 12, this new car will weigh less and take less time to solder. To get the required torque at the front wheel, there is a gear ratio of 5:1 and with the readout switch mounted in the correct position and a capacitor at the rear the car is complete but works by pushing the car forward, the capacitor charges and then changes from a generator to a motor and powers the car.

I can even charge the capacitor by giving it a few pushes forward, then place it on a surface and give it a little push to activate the readout switch almost like a wind-up electric car. I'm actually quite surprised at how well this car runs, to be honest, with this very basic motor and a small capacitor in the back, just by turning the wheel a few times we can charge the capacitor and if we give it a small push just to activate the reading switch with the magnet, it powers the car very easily and what is also interesting is that it works. quite well as a generator, so for example, if I push it along this distance to charge the capacitor, place it at the beginning of the distance and set it in motion, it travels quite slowly but it also travels a path right along the distance I moved. obviously it's not the whole distance because it's not 100% efficient but it's pretty good, but before you install one of these motor generator combos in your car, I want to tell you about this video, sponsor kiwico, many of the projects I build, help me to explore. and learn new concepts, but they are not always the easiest to replicate.

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This car is the same weight and I kept the magnetic part of the motor as it will act as a flywheel and affect the results, so the only difference is the coils and capacity. I have no idea how these cars are going to compare, but physics would suggest that if we push them at the same speed, they should travel the same distance, so let's see the freewheeling car gets a good head start, the generator car goes a long way. slower than freewheeling. the car stops and the generator car goes further, that doesn't make much sense. I think we need to rerun the test, make sure the capacitor is fully discharged, yes that motor is not running at all, align them and release them when the car takes the car generator that is going in the lead again it is very far back and the car generator wins, so the generator car must be capturing energy from somewhere that's not obvious in this test, but what happens if we send both cars down a ramp?

This gives both cars identical amounts of starting potential energy and it is clear that the car with the engine travels downhill much slower, so just before breaking loose both cars have the same gravitational potential energy, but as they travel Downhill, the freely rotating car converts more of its potential energy into kinetic energy, while the car with the generator converts a portion of this energy into electrical energy and stores it in the capacitor. It's easy to forget that when electricity is generated, a resistance load is applied to the generator like it does with my hand crank generator if I spin it without loading anything in there.

There is very little resistance, but as soon as I use it to charge a capacitor or a battery, it suddenly becomes much harder to turn, so the car goes slower down the ramp because there is a resistive load, while the capacitor charges now this stored energy. in the capacitor is eventually converted back to kinetic energy as the capacitor powers the motor, but because the system is not 100% efficient, the total travel distance is less if the ramp test shows that some coils are magnetic and a capacitor does not. To get an advantage over a free rolling car, why does the push test show the opposite?

The main difference between these tests is the force that is applied to each car, so in the ramp test there is a constant force acting on each car due to gravity, however, with thrust. Testing the generator car requires more force to bring it to the same speed and this would be like running the ramp test again, but the generator car takes a steeper drop, so they both exit the ramp with the same kinetic energy, which which makes it much clearer why the generator car travels further, but there is a method to make the freely rotating car win the push test if we apply a force to the car over a given distance, this is known in physics as doing work and is calculated by multiplying force by distance, so if both cars are pushed at the same speed, the generating car not only requires more work due to the greater force, but can also store this work in the capacitor, while the freely rotating car can only use its final kinetic energy, therefore, if we push both cars. reaches speed in the shortest possible distance, very little work is done and the generator car cannot charge the capacitor enough to win the race, but I have the idea that the free spinning car will never compete with this is a platform Peltier which is often used in portable refrigerators as when power is applied one side is heated and the other is cooled but this also works the other way around so if we apply heat to one side and cool the other side with a heat sink, now produces electricity, my friend. and fellow YouTuber Sam Barker had the idea of ​​making a car powered by these Peltier pads and built a prototype to test it;

However, the pads produce so little power that many commercially available motors do not run without load. The Peltier pad produces about 1 to 1.4 volts. It's getting a little warm for my fingers. Now I have a resistor here so we can apply charge to the um. That's a little easier to hold now, but we only get about 32 volts. which by my calculations is about 0.065 watts or about 65 M. However, if my calculations are correct, this generator car should be able to run on about 20 M, so let's see if we can power this car with a candle to do this.

I built a new car as the coils have to be wound specifically for the low input voltage and I designed this platform at the back of the chassis to hold the candle and the pelti pad can be placed on top of a wire support to hopefully prevent it from 3D prints melt So with the candle lit, it's ready to go or not, let's add some ice to cool down the heatsink a little and hopefully get more power. This technically works, but it's extremely slow, so I got some extra candle wicks to make three custom ones. I wick a candle for more heat and use my heat gun to make the wax flow so hopefully three times as much heat and some ice on the roof we should haveenough energy.

This video started as a car with an efficient generator and a motor that could recover energy as regenerative braking in today's electric cars and has now come full circle to an electric hybrid powered by ice combustion anyway . I hope you found this video interesting and I'll see you in the next one, thanks for watching.