Use for the Tesla Switch

[Kepszlok]

Hi Matt!

Some time passed since our talks, but now i'm back with a working switch. I was able to put the third winding into my toroid and i let the circuit run for 6.5 hours.

This was the 'smaller one' with the optocoupled switches from your guide (page 25, with simple analog timer based switch). The batterys are 5Ah brand new ones. I do not used a graetz + puffer in the secunder winding, instead i simply used a 6.8Ohm power resistor for load.

~40Hz was the perfect switching frequency for maximum output voltage. That's about 20Vpp (with the load attached) - 6.8Vac according to a DMM.


What i experienced so far:
The 'upper' batterys are mostly kept their voltage, while the other two are drained as you can see in the first picture.

That draineing of the 'lower' two batterys will stops somtime?

[Kepszlok]

Today i ran the system for 8 hours, and the upper batterys are swapped with the lowers at the start.

The situation was similar, the upper ones are mostly kept their charge while the lower ones are drained.


How to proceed further?

[Spokane1]

Ron Brandt Tesla Switch Isolation Transformer

The transformer I used had 2 windings that were equal and one for output that was 20% longer. As far as wire size goes use something that will give you 100 turns or better

I'll dig one out tomorrow and measure
the resistance and Henry count.

Matt

Dear Matt,

Could you share with us the important details as to how you came to posses and propose the design and function of the trifilar push-pull isolation transformer that you describe in your white paper. Was this your design based upon the schematic disclosed in the 1994 Extraordinary Science article or did you gain additional privileged information from the inventor or other source?

The Gray technology is also based upon a similar transformer and involves the use of low voltage wet cell batteries. In my pursuit of reverse engineering the Gray technology it is helpful to examine all parallel experiments.

There have been some important construction details that have come to light concerning the Gray technology transformer that may have a direct impact upon a sucessful replication of the Brandt system.

At your leasure please call me at 509-842-1210 in Spokane, WA to pass on some novel construction techniquest that were employed in the Gray system.

Mark McKay, PE

[Matthew Jones]

I have been real busy with the farm and didn't know this stuff was up here. My desktop burned up the other day and I am waitingon another to come. I am not going have a conversation until I get a keyboard. The phone just will not do to type.

Thanks for understanding.

Matt

[Kepszlok]

Yeah, typeing from a phone are sucks.


Meanwhile, i will proceed with further testing in thursday, using some higher value power resistors and further calibration. 6.8ohm of load for a 1.5ohm secunder coil are too big.

[Matthew Jones]

Dear Matt,

Could you share with us the important details as to how you came to posses and propose the design and function of the trifilar push-pull isolation transformer that you describe in your white paper. Was this your design based upon the schematic disclosed in the 1994 Extraordinary Science article or did you gain additional privileged information from the inventor or other source?

The Gray technology is also based upon a similar transformer and involves the use of low voltage wet cell batteries. In my pursuit of reverse engineering the Gray technology it is helpful to examine all parallel experiments.

There have been some important construction details that have come to light concerning the Gray technology transformer that may have a direct impact upon a sucessful replication of the Brandt system.

At your leasure please call me at 509-842-1210 in Spokane, WA to pass on some novel construction techniquest that were employed in the Gray system.

Mark McKay, PE

Can you give some links to this Novel info? I do not find much on it.

I wouldn't mind having a discussion but there is not much to talk about. The article said it all. The transformer can be tuned to perfection between the load and a capacitor to maximize the conversion of back and forth DC to a better AC sine so the transformer no matter what it is at its most efficient.
The batteries need to be in very good shape.

If everything is working correctly and you are not asking for huge load the system will balance out for a long period of time. I found 300 amp hour batteries can supply a 100 watt load for real long time without any consumption from the battery. The trick is keeping the battery temperature stable at or around 72 degrees. If you get big temp swings then you throw everything out. This is also true in several systems I have come up with since then.

Internal resistance in a battery is very important.

But out of it all the newest systems I have built are tuned to the response of an isolated inverter. When I say Isolated I mean the AC side and DC side are not grounded in common which is what you'll find in cheap inverters. Like wise the grounds are earth ground on the AC side, or neutral like normal grid power.

Inverters SMA's Sunny Boy Islands are so capable of tuning into a Tesla switch type system it gets ridiculous. All you need is to be able to turn the pulse into a flat DC with no more than 1% ripple at any point. Its not hard though with 3 banks. Discharging, charging and resting. Generally if you able to get this system going you can calculate loss at switching cost, but you have to have big enough banks to take the power and raise the potential difference`while providing adequate current. This current also needs to be regulated to make sure the batteries are at a peak point of about 14.5 volt, or 29 volt, ect.

To truly do some real work you are looking at an investment of around 8 - 10 dollars a watt. This makes it hard in the face of solar which is well below 1 dollar a watt for whole systems, if you can install it yourself.

If you have questions ask. Its hard for me to imagine where I was in the beginning so I might not have made things clear.

Matt


Matt

[Kepszlok]

Now i got a bunch of new result with a 12 ohm load.
After running my circuit for 17 hours, now i have assumptions and calculations.

The most important is this: the lower batterys are draining constantly with around 0.07V / hour. This means the circuit are able to run theoreticaly for 2*20 hours with one battery swap. For this calculation i assumed the charged battery voltage to 12.8V (measured in working switch with the load attached), and the drained battery voltage to 11.4V (i made a complet discharge cycle in one of these 5Ah batterys to get it's end of life point). So we have ~1.4V to play with.

In my setup, there are no rectifier attached to the secunder coil, just the load for simplifying things. So the output voltage are 7..8Vrms. This means an 0.577A rms avarage load current. This gives ~23Ah

If i'm correct, a 5Ah battery in real life are about ~0.8*5Ah. So with 4 paralel connected battery, there are 16Ah vs 23Ah with tesla switch. This like we got a fifth battery for free.

I'm a bit conserned about the loss of the switching transistors. They are warm even with a moderate heatshink. I will replace them with power mosfets in the future tests.
I'm also conserned about using an ordenary graetz bridge to get the DC. I will use cheap power schottky diodes instead for lower loss. (like MBR-760)


And i have to ask about the tuning procedure. The output voltage are perfectly constant in a range of +-20Hz, with centered on 40Hz. Is this normal? Only the shape of the square wave are degrading when moveing off from 40Hz.
My output voltage are also somewhat lover than what i expected.

My last question are about when to swap batterys? I see some chargeing for about 2 hours on the upper batterys after startup and every battery swap. So when to swap battery? If the lower ones are near 11.4V or when the upper ones are no longer chargeing?

[Spokane1]

Gray Technology 101

Can you give some links to this Novel info? I do not find much on it.

Matt

Dear Matt,

Most of the documents on the Internet are dated, I know because I wrote a number of them. Email me at mmckay@simplexgrinnell.com and I shall send you more than you probably care to read in a week. The 32 year saga reads like a Tom Clancy spy novel.

However the technical preformance blows the pants off anything that is under development today. I'm speaking of a laboratory tested COP of 282.0 at a power level of 7.5 kW, and that is what they started with. The tests were done at Cal Tech in 1973 under the direction of two PhD EE's who worked for JPL and specialized in Power Supplies. They knew what they were doing and had the best insturmentation to work with.

I did a DVD book on what happened to this breakthrough in 2012, but only a few people bought it. From all I can gather the technology was real and powerful. The kernal is an open core push pull induction transformer with two opposing primaries.

If Mr. Brandt had something like this in his sucessful circuit then I can see how he was able to make the claims that he did. A large part of the sucess of the Gray circuit is how the secondary output is harvested with wet cell batteries and stored in capacitors. What many people over look is that the huge OU output was not in an electrical form it was in torque. Perhaps that is why Mr. Brandt started working with reluctance motors which is a good fit for the novel energy that was generated.

This is why I'm interested in the transformer. If it was similiar to a Gray transformer then I'm going to pay close attention to what Mr. Brandt was doing with his battery switching scheme as a method to harvest and store the energy for use in a repulsion/reluctance motor.

Speaking of Mr. Brandt, correct me if I'm wrong. Didn't Mr. Brandt build his sucessful electric car around 1982-1984? Apparently he spent the rest of his life attempting to reproduce and improve his original breakthrough. It appears he was unable to do this.

I'm sure that the Tesla Switch does have the ability to extend battery life and performance, but in its present disclosed form I doubt it could provide enough Joules to run a car 400 miles. I believe that Mr. Brandt unfortunately overlooked something in his reproduction attempts.

Mark McKay, PE

[Matthew Jones]

Now i got a bunch of new result with a 12 ohm load.
After running my circuit for 17 hours, now i have assumptions and calculations.

The most important is this: the lower batterys are draining constantly with around 0.07V / hour. This means the circuit are able to run theoreticaly for 2*20 hours with one battery swap. For this calculation i assumed the charged battery voltage to 12.8V (measured in working switch with the load attached), and the drained battery voltage to 11.4V (i made a complet discharge cycle in one of these 5Ah batterys to get it's end of life point). So we have ~1.4V to play with.

In my setup, there are no rectifier attached to the secunder coil, just the load for simplifying things. So the output voltage are 7..8Vrms. This means an 0.577A rms avarage load current. This gives ~23Ah

If i'm correct, a 5Ah battery in real life are about ~0.8*5Ah. So with 4 paralel connected battery, there are 16Ah vs 23Ah with tesla switch. This like we got a fifth battery for free.

I'm a bit conserned about the loss of the switching transistors. They are warm even with a moderate heatshink. I will replace them with power mosfets in the future tests.
I'm also conserned about using an ordenary graetz bridge to get the DC. I will use cheap power schottky diodes instead for lower loss. (like MBR-760)


And i have to ask about the tuning procedure. The output voltage are perfectly constant in a range of +-20Hz, with centered on 40Hz. Is this normal? Only the shape of the square wave are degrading when moveing off from 40Hz.
My output voltage are also somewhat lover than what i expected.

My last question are about when to swap batterys? I see some chargeing for about 2 hours on the upper batterys after startup and every battery swap. So when to swap battery? If the lower ones are near 11.4V or when the upper ones are no longer chargeing?

Its been a while since I even built one of these I put in the book.

Which exact circuit are you running? What is the transistor part# that switches your system? What is the make of the transformer (Type, color if toroid, VA, and windings)?

So generally to get started I look Peak output voltage. Once I got that I look for peak current. Both are frequency adjustments. Then I try balance them
The other thing you have to look at and especially with the small batts is the the VA of the transformer. So to saturate the transformer you need a pulse of X size and time, Does that pulse exceed the C20 rating of the battery?
Maybe you have to size things up a bit.

If you transistors are HOT thats a lot of loss. You could figure it by the temperature to see if correlates to the drop in the battery. You might try some passive protection across the transformer. A couple of diodes.

Last I find the biggest losses to come from resistive loads while under AC. And you are.....
Try using a High speed or No time diodes for the bridge and couple that with a cap capable of running the system for at least 1 second. (Count the joules).

For battery swaps I like to run the $hit out of the lower batteries as long as they do not drop below 10.4 they usually are OK. I don't do that on every run but I look for the balance.
So what that means is for example the top battery hit 14.5 the bottom hit 11.00 and the system at that point stay stable. The difference between the 2 serial batteries is high enough that power spills over.
Now 2 things inhibit this and it sucks but its just fact. The transistor voltage drop, and the C20 rating of the battery + the saturation point of the transformer. You may not be able to drive those batteries into that position if anything knocking down the power point you cannot get the spill over effect.

Fill in the blanks on your setup for me and we'll try to get you the 8x I know you can get out of the system.

@MARK I'll hollar at ya soon as I get today over with.

Cheers
Matt

[Kepszlok]

Hy!

It's the 'smaller one' circuit on page 25 from your book, just with a simple 555 timer based pulse generator circuit.

For the transistors, i used MJE 15032 and 15033's http://www.onsemi.com/pub_link/Colla...MJE15032-D.PDF, they are 250V 8A power transistors. I have some spare parts of these from an amplifier building project. Your transistors in the book are MJL 21193 and 94 http://www.onsemi.com/pub_link/Colla...MJL21193-D.PDF, they are 16A power transistors with better Rthjc (and more robust case design), that can explains my heating issue.
I will try using protector diodes. Also, i'm still thinking of using mosfets. With the proper setup, they can have extremly small on state resistance. This may also helps with the "inhibiting facts" by lovering transistor voltage drop.

For the transformer, it's my hand work. See it in my previous picture: http://www.energeticforum.com/attach...016_102602-jpg I asked your transformer paramteres in late 2014 http://www.energeticforum.com/264280-post4173.html, then in this summer i finished it. It's a total of 55m AWG21 wire hooked in a not too big toroid core (about 3*4cm, maybe 100..200VA?), on top of it's exitsing wireing. This may harm it's efficency a bit, i'm not sure. Also, the wireing is a mess. Doing the wireing by hand are not an easy job.
I may construct an other transformer with stronger wireing, now i have a much bigger toroid core to work with.

Last I find the biggest losses to come from resistive loads while under AC. And you are.....
Try using a High speed or No time diodes for the bridge and couple that with a cap capable of running the system for at least 1 second. (Count the joules).
I tryed to get rid of diode losses for initial testing, that's why i put the load directly to the transformer. I see no reason why it's affects the overall performance, but i will try how you sad. Getting DC out from the system are also a goal so...

But for 40Hz, why do you recommends fast diodes? In my company, we are developing battery charger circuits, and we had to replace the ordenary high power SMD diodes with schottky ones, because they are on 2A load current built up massive heat and loss. Using schottkys are eliminated this problem. I also have some spare MBR-760 schottky's to play with.


About the C20 rating, i think it is 5Ah. If i'm correct, these are the batterys what i'm using: (i can only check it next week in the office)
EnerSys NP5-12FR General Purpose Battery, Lead Calcium AGM, ABS Resin case, 12V with (2) F1 or F2 Faston terminals [5Ah (c20)], 3.54"L x 2.76"W x 4.21"H (max ht), 4 Lbs
We use these batterys in alarm systems and they are new ones, never used anywhere.

[Matthew Jones]

Dear Matt,...
I'm sure that the Tesla Switch does have the ability to extend battery life and performance, but in its present disclosed form I doubt it could provide enough Joules to run a car 400 miles. I believe that Mr. Brandt unfortunately overlooked something in his reproduction attempts.

Mark McKay, PE

To tall ya the truth I think he had it wired wrong. The best performance I have seen out of his setup came from driving an AC EI core in singular directional pulses. Instead going back and forth on seperate windings to drive a third winding you can pulse each side in the same direction according to the geometry of the transformer.
Toroids don't work. They are design to suppress transient responses. EI Cores put out huge spikes. Coils work too but not as well, you need that magnetic loop. Laminated toroid AC core usually have silicon steel and that doesn't appear to work either. At least from what I have seen.
On short runs (thats the most I have been able to do) I have seen all four batteries charge. Thats the good side of it...
The noise alone from the transformer is near unbearable and radio for 100 yards +- is impossible. The worst thing though is the transistors or Fets fail real quick.
But it works, I am just not up to the task of building a switch thats good enough to handle it.

I did this about 4 years ago and tried real hard to make it work but with no resolve and eventually ran out of money.

Later, while looking at Babcock's patent I could kind of see a way through all this but I didn't have the resources to try. It didn't follow the simple outline of the transformer setup shown in the Brandt article but It could work. Looping the inductive response back through the system at higher frequencies to emulate a low frequency pulse, similar to what happens in a modified sine wave inverter. It was either this or find that "Special Transistor" in the Brandt drawing that could handle that inductive response with out damaging heat.

So some of the tests I have done show weird results. The largest test I used 4 1500 amp hour starter bats. I was able to push 12 volt +- at 100 amp into one side of the transformer at a pulse width of about 30 ms per side with a 10 second off time between per side pulses and the output of the transformer was 10 volt at 150 amp for 35ms. The 10 volt +- was above the charging bank. The output on the third winding was at 24 volt +- dc at 54 amps with 38 ms pulse width.
I built this one with 6x 400 volt 20 amp mosfet's per switch.
The end result was a foul stench and a lot of smoke. But all the batteries went up after a 1 hour rest

I have always wished I could crack that nut and this is the first time I have ever told anyone publicly the results. In my mind it could have been as simple as bad wiring on the transformer, if he had one in the car and some kind of super transistor that could handle the noise. But who really knows.

Matt

[Matthew Jones]

Hy!

It's the 'smaller one' circuit on page 25 from your book, just with a simple 555 timer based pulse generator circuit.

For the transistors, i used MJE 15032 and 15033's http://www.onsemi.com/pub_link/Colla...MJE15032-D.PDF, they are 250V 8A power transistors. I have some spare parts of these from an amplifier building project. Your transistors in the book are MJL 21193 and 94 http://www.onsemi.com/pub_link/Colla...MJL21193-D.PDF, they are 16A power transistors with better Rthjc (and more robust case design), that can explains my heating issue.
I will try using protector diodes. Also, i'm still thinking of using mosfets. With the proper setup, they can have extremly small on state resistance. This may also helps with the "inhibiting facts" by lovering transistor voltage drop.

For the transformer, it's my hand work. See it in my previous picture: http://www.energeticforum.com/attach...016_102602-jpg I asked your transformer paramteres in late 2014 http://www.energeticforum.com/264280-post4173.html, then in this summer i finished it. It's a total of 55m AWG21 wire hooked in a not too big toroid core (about 3*4cm, maybe 100..200VA?), on top of it's exitsing wireing. This may harm it's efficency a bit, i'm not sure. Also, the wireing is a mess. Doing the wireing by hand are not an easy job.
I may construct an other transformer with stronger wireing, now i have a much bigger toroid core to work with.

Last I find the biggest losses to come from resistive loads while under AC. And you are.....
Try using a High speed or No time diodes for the bridge and couple that with a cap capable of running the system for at least 1 second. (Count the joules).
I tryed to get rid of diode losses for initial testing, that's why i put the load directly to the transformer. I see no reason why it's affects the overall performance, but i will try how you sad. Getting DC out from the system are also a goal so...

But for 40Hz, why do you recommends fast diodes? In my company, we are developing battery charger circuits, and we had to replace the ordenary high power SMD diodes with schottky ones, because they are on 2A load current built up massive heat and loss. Using schottkys are eliminated this problem. I also have some spare MBR-760 schottky's to play with.


About the C20 rating, i think it is 5Ah. If i'm correct, these are the batterys what i'm using: (i can only check it next week in the office)
EnerSys NP5-12FR General Purpose Battery, Lead Calcium AGM, ABS Resin case, 12V with (2) F1 or F2 Faston terminals [5Ah (c20)], 3.54"L x 2.76"W x 4.21"H (max ht), 4 Lbs
We use these batterys in alarm systems and they are new ones, never used anywhere.

So couple of things come to mind right off the bat. Just pointing them out not criticizing.
That transformer looks a little loose and wound heavy like that may have a little to much resistance while having a lot of induction. Depending on the material in the core you might need higher speeds but the induction and resistance in the windings will inhibit this hence 40 hz, when generally I have seen speeds ranging from 60 to 400hz which seems to work best depending on the application. Thats also with an EI core. I have not seen much luck with toroids and they are pain to wind as you probably now know. LOL

Even though your load is low one thing you need to look at is how much current passes on the primary windings. Input and output. So a good transformer passes 10 amp to do 5-7 amp of work on the output winding. Its never equal but should be 50% at least.

The transistors you are using may suit the system but I would shy away from using to much resistance on the base. Let the base catch a little current. This also may cool down the transistor overall. After all they can handle 2 amp (MAX) on the base. Not sure but you may not be opening up the junction enough. To know that though you have to push it and see its performance heat wise.
Also the transformer may effect the heat situation with spikes as per your induction level in the windings. Lower the amount of windings to decreases the size of the spike. Toroids don't require as much winding to couple the magnetic field. Evenly wound shorter wires perform better.
If the transformer is the culprit for heat mosfets won't change this. Transients are also the reason I encourage DC output to a capacitor. The transient will leave the transformer on the output line and be negated by the cap.
As far as the diodes go I like "No Recovery Time" Diodes which are generally Schottky but not always as they quikly move spikes away, No heat and in situation where they are over rated for the job you get no voltage drop. This is a typical one I use.
I would run that up to 5 amp, and at 5 amp it would drop the voltage only a small portion at 1 amp you would see no voltage drop.
Depending on the application and my expectation I would wind the transformer output to compensate for that drop.
I always size my diodes high to avoid voltage drop, after all this is research so the budget should have to count, but I know it does.

Also what people never thin of is trying to capture the OUTPUT power off the transformer and shuttle it to the batteries to prolong runtime. In your case with the small batts that might make all the difference. Its trick though.

Keep me up to date, or post more questions and results.

Thanks
Matt

[Kepszlok]

Thanks for the advises. I will check the base resistors first before i change the transisotrs to bigger power transistors or mosfets.

I will check the currents on the transformer, but it will be a nightmare to shorter the wires. I understand why are you recommends this, i may try it. What do you think ideal? How about -30% for all coils?
Btw i do not seen any spikes in the primers with scope so at least that's not an issue.
For a second option, i can use a much bigger toroid core, it's tall but have a big hole what makes it easy to put my wires on it. Getting an empty hipersil core or something like that in these days are hard or expensive.


Today i built a graetz bridge from power schottky's. Compared to a common graetz bridge, it was cooler while puts out about 15% more DC voltage. I will use tem.

[Kepszlok]

Now i know what's wrong with my transformer. That's what is measured today:
Primer1: 78mH, Primer2: 110mH, Secunder: 25mH

I have to remove all the wireing (includeing the original wireing), and put on three new coil to the bare toroid core. I think i will wire them next to eachoter in the core. In this way, they will be completly similar in all terms. (except the secunder)

For now i think 10m - 10m - 15m for the three coils will be good. I will continue the testing when the rewireing are complete.

[Matthew Jones]

Now i know what's wrong with my transformer. That's what is measured today:
Primer1: 78mH, Primer2: 110mH, Secunder: 25mH

I have to remove all the wireing (includeing the original wireing), and put on three new coil to the bare toroid core. I think i will wire them next to eachoter in the core. In this way, they will be completly similar in all terms. (except the secunder)

For now i think 10m - 10m - 15m for the three coils will be good. I will continue the testing when the rewireing are complete.

There are several good articles out there on winding toroids. They cover both how to do it economically and for precision. Just look around bit before you get going.

Matt