Use for the Tesla Switch

[Matthew Jones]

If your heating up that bad you are most likely wired up wrong.

Read closly

2 banks of batts, left and the right.
1 coil of wire with 3 windings with 2 point the start and the finish an OUTPUT and 2 primaries

Your left bank POWER goes into the Start of its winding and out the Finish.
Your right bank goes into the Finish and out of the Start.

On the OutPut wire you should see a AC signal and measure AC voltage. If the output goes through the bridge and the Voltage grows (IE 15 volt on the AC side, 18 volt on ht DC side) then you are defendantly wired wrong.

Thats the only suggestion I can give you since your not using an IC to do the switching. Your switching apparatus may not be shutting off the transistor fully or something.

When I had the smaller one setup I used the IC to drive 2 opto's in turn drove a Darlington with 2 MJL's. It worked fine but the IC assures it. Oscillators do not always act as one would expect. I have lit many fires in the early days trying different oscillator circuits.

Check your coil wiring.
Cheers
Matt

[Mario]

If your heating up that bad you are most likely wired up wrong.

Read closly

2 banks of batts, left and the right.
1 coil of wire with 3 windings with 2 point the start and the finish an OUTPUT and 2 primaries

Your left bank POWER goes into the Start of its winding and out the Finish.
Your right bank goes into the Finish and out of the Start.

On the OutPut wire you should see a AC signal and measure AC voltage. If the output goes through the bridge and the Voltage grows (IE 15 volt on the AC side, 18 volt on ht DC side) then you are defendantly wired wrong.

Thats the only suggestion I can give you since your not using an IC to do the switching. Your switching apparatus may not be shutting off the transistor fully or something.

When I had the smaller one setup I used the IC to drive 2 opto's in turn drove a Darlington with 2 MJL's. It worked fine but the IC assures it. Oscillators do not always act as one would expect. I have lit many fires in the early days trying different oscillator circuits.

Check your coil wiring.
Cheers
Matt

Hey Matt,

thanks, I had it all right, just my transistors wouldn't shut off completely, so there was a like permanent short... I had to add some resistors on the darlington setup, now when the oscillator is off the trannies are off too.

After all this shorting stuff the motorycle batts were down so I'll have to recondition and equalize them again. In the mean time I've put my 7Ah gel cells, which I had just cap pulse cycled and equalized, into the circuit. I had a 12V 20W bulb on the output and let it run for an hour or so. The top batts voltage didn't move at all, be it while running or after shut down. The lower batts loose voltage though.

The frequency is 480 Hz. If someone wants to try this, you can't just set any frequency, after you work for a while with solid state SG's, selftriggered or not, you know what to look for and where the right frequency is for a given load and coil size. I believe you can't use high frequency with an air coil, as the T-switch effect in the batteries seems to work best in the 200-600 Hz area, Matt do you see this the same way?

But I just realized that an SG litzed multistrand coil is not right at all to do this in this application. It's ok to have the primary windings all together, but the secondaries need to sit somewhere else on the core. This is because unlike the SG we need direct transformer action which in an SG coil would result in a primary and secondary coil sitting right next to each other but have current in opposite direction. I'm sure this is the reason my coil is still somewhat hot, not hot as before though.

To take care of the lower batt problem one could have two extra secondary strands from the transformer feed back power to them with one diode each so that they get hit in an alternate way, say lower right batt gets hit when upper right gets hit... same for left side.

Now I have to make a new transformer...

cheers,
Mario

[Matthew Jones]

My transformer will run between 60 - 800 hz. But you right there is range.

I am guessing you just have to much resistance in the windings. My transformer has .1 ohms on the meter. The coil I ran, if memory serves me right, had around 2 ohms. SG application is quite a bit different.
I run all the wires together in a transformer.

You'll get it all tuned up and it will show you some results soon though. Good Work.

Matt

[rosehillworks]

Something to think about shtep61.jpg

[John_K]

I'm not having any problems running a transformer as a load. No Mr BOOM! here either!

I'm running an old inverter transformer (12v-240v) at 500Hz 50%. The load off the transformer is a 25W 240VAC microwave oven bulb. The bulb is fully lit and I get 234V across it.

Transformer doesn't get warm at all and the trannys are just a few degrees above ambient.


John K.

[Mario]

I'm not having any problems running a transformer as a load. No Mr BOOM! here either!

I'm running an old inverter transformer (12v-240v) at 500Hz 50%. The load off the transformer is a 25W 240VAC microwave oven bulb. The bulb is fully lit and I get 234V across it.

Transformer doesn't get warm at all and the trannys are just a few degrees above ambient.


John K.

Hi John,

how is it going down under . What setup are you describing, Matt's variant or standard T-switch setup? What resistance are the 12V wires of your transformer? For my "Matt-setup" I made an efficient transformer using a big ferrite U core (two to close the magnetic circuit) with primary and secondary coils that I made. Primary wires are 0.2 ohms.
The result I'm seeing is the top batteries not moving at all, they just keep their voltage no matter what. The two bottom batts loose voltage over time. I have made additional windings to pulse the bottom batts too. When the top battery is hit from the 24V series batts the bottom batt on the same side is also hit from the additional secondaries, like it would be in a normal T-swtich. Although the circuit is working perfectly this doesn't work! The energy I'm trying to steal from the transformer to re-inject power into the bottom batts seems to load them more than the energy supplied to them. The result is: bottom batts are loaded even more, something I wouldn't have thought...

[Mario]

I'm not having any problems running a transformer as a load. No Mr BOOM! here either!

I'm running an old inverter transformer (12v-240v) at 500Hz 50%. The load off the transformer is a 25W 240VAC microwave oven bulb. The bulb is fully lit and I get 234V across it.

Transformer doesn't get warm at all and the trannys are just a few degrees above ambient.


John K.

Hi John,

how is it going down under . What setup are you describing, Matt's variant or standard T-switch setup? What resistance are the 12V wires of your transformer? For my "Matt-setup" I made an efficient transformer using a big ferrite U core (two to close the magnetic circuit) with primary and secondary coils that I made. Primary wires are 0.2 ohms.

The result I'm seeing is the top batteries not moving at all, they just keep their voltage no matter what. The two bottom batts loose voltage over time. If I swap top with bottom batts the same happens, top keep their voltage (although lower than at start now) and bottom slowly drops.
I have made additional windings to pulse the bottom batts too. When the top battery is hit from the 24V series batts the bottom batt on the same side is also hit from the additional secondaries, like it would be in a normal T-swtich. Although the circuit is working perfectly this doesn't work! The energy I'm trying to steal from the transformer to re-inject power into the bottom batts seems to load them more than the energy supplied to them. The result is: bottom batts are loaded even more, something I wouldn't have thought...

How are your batts behaving over time?

cheers,
Mario

[Matthew Jones]

@Mario
Whats the resistance on your primary windings?

If its too high your just throwing everything onto the secondaries. You gotta match the impedance of the battery as close as possible. You should have less than 1 ohm on the primary.
Thats part of the reason I chose a large 3 kva transformer body and not something smaller. You should be just passing current on the wire and collecting the residual magnetism/charge for the output.

If your core chokes/saturates from the small amount of power you passing then it will never work. You cannot compensate for that without external power.

Best advice is find a big metal transformer.

Matt

[Mario]

Hi Matt,

I used 18 AWG 45 feet for primaries so it should be around 0.1/0.2 ohms max. I've attached a pic of the transformer. The core is impossible to saturate at these levels as it's rated up to 1KW. I've attached a pic.

cheers,
Mario

[Matthew Jones]

Hi Matt,

I used 18 AWG 45 feet for primaries so it should be around 0.1/0.2 ohms max. I've attached a pic of the transformer. The core is impossible to saturate at these levels as it's rated up to 1KW. I've attached a pic.

cheers,
Mario

I wouldn't know what to tell ya. Thats core is pretty far from what I use. Its not even in the ballpark.

Matt

[Mario]

Matt, before putting this transformer into the circuit I did normal transformer tests with sine and square waves, it's around 90% efficient. I did this going from 600 down to 60 Hz and around 130Hz is where it was most efficient. The primaries are very low resistance. Why wouldn't it be ok for this application?

Also, what happens to your batteries, the top ones charge (if not full already) and bottom discharge you said, correct? If you swap top with bottom batts after the bottoms get low, do they get back to the full voltage the top ones were? I mean can you keep swapping top with bottom and keep going without loss?

Mario

[Matthew Jones]

I don't know why it wouldn't work but you have no power going to the top bank of batteries apparently something is wrong.

I just have regular transformer with soft iron plates and it works great. So...

There is a difference in these things for some reason or another. I cannot say anything will work, I know what I used works.

Matt

[John_K]

Hi John,

how is it going down under . What setup are you describing, Matt's variant or standard T-switch setup? What resistance are the 12V wires of your transformer? For my "Matt-setup" I made an efficient transformer using a big ferrite U core (two to close the magnetic circuit) with primary and secondary coils that I made. Primary wires are 0.2 ohms.

The result I'm seeing is the top batteries not moving at all, they just keep their voltage no matter what. The two bottom batts loose voltage over time. If I swap top with bottom batts the same happens, top keep their voltage (although lower than at start now) and bottom slowly drops.
I have made additional windings to pulse the bottom batts too. When the top battery is hit from the 24V series batts the bottom batt on the same side is also hit from the additional secondaries, like it would be in a normal T-swtich. Although the circuit is working perfectly this doesn't work! The energy I'm trying to steal from the transformer to re-inject power into the bottom batts seems to load them more than the energy supplied to them. The result is: bottom batts are loaded even more, something I wouldn't have thought...

How are your batts behaving over time?

cheers,
Mario

Hi Mario,

It's a standard TS setup. I was just messing around with a few different transformers to see what they would do. From memory the 12V winding on the inverter transformer was 1.6 ohms.

I can get the batts to last a lot longer than if I just loaded them down conventionally. My best testing showed that if I ran the load for about 15 minutes and then let the batts rest for an hour, they come back up to their starting voltage - almost like I took nothing out of them. I didn't take any long term data but it was very interesting.


John K.

[hherby]

You betcha buddy! I'm so excited I'm nearly wetting myself.

Just have to build the flux capacitor!


John K.

Hi John and Bits,
I noticed the TS presentations are not listed on the convention agenda on Rick's site anymore. I sure hope you guys are still presenting. Can you confirm please?

Thanks

Alex

[Bit's-n-Bytes]

Hi John and Bits,
I noticed the TS presentations are not listed on the convention agenda on Rick's site anymore. I sure hope you guys are still presenting. Can you confirm please?

Thanks

Alex

Alex, due to circumstances beyond my control, Rick removed me from the conference venue. This was an issue over compensation and that is about as much as I want to venture into this. I decided therefore not to attend the conference, however will maintain my sprit and willingness to help out with the fine folks on this forum.


Bit's