MWresearch

Suppose I have a number, any random number like .3252389472395872394729..., is there software that will test possible exact formulas containing certain parameters, like if I want it to test if that number could be some coefficient of pi or e or e*pi or sin(tan(cos(sin(tan(cos(42424244424)?

Ok, so are you trying to say that, no mater what direction the alternator rotates in a single circuit throughout one period of time, like it rotates clockwise for one second then all of a sudden it starts rotating counterclockwise for half a second then starts rotating clockwise again, one rectifying bridge will make all output almost continuous in the form of closely spaced DC pulses? What if there is sensitive circuitry? Is that what those smoothing capacitors are for?

I'm not at all talking about motors, just alternators and occasionally generators. That sentence is too choppy for me to interpret anything useful from it. So, do you mean, after putting in a rectifying bridge, the output current will be an alternating, pulsating current? Or, do you mean, prior to a bridge rectifier, the change of rotation from clockwise to counterclockwise will generate an AC current in the form of pulses that have both a crest and trough? Or pulses that have two troughs at a time and two crests at a time? Ok now all of a sudden you're not making any sense to me. I'm not trying to rectify a DC current, a DC current is already good to go, I'm trying to rectify an AC current from an alternator that can rotate both clockwise and counterclockwise and turn it into a continuous DC current.

But that's the problem. In an AC current, it's not + the whole time and - the whole time for any given orientation of rotation. If I spin it ONLY clockwise, it will generate both + and - and create a sinusoidal pattern of electrical waves which switch from drawing charges from one direction to drawing charges from the other direction 100 times a second. THEN, if I switch the rotation to COUNTERclockwise, the same type of pattern would occur except the voltage should be + when the clockwise wave would be - and be - when the clockwise wave would be +, so I'd have a double alternating current basically if it continuously switched from clockwise to counterclockwise, and it's not just windmills that try to avoid this, it's cars and iphones and all sorts of stuff. Basically, it would switch from +sin(x) to -sin(x). Wait, I need 4 diodes just to rectify one orientation of rotation? How many would I need to correct two? 24 diodes? Why wouldn't I need one bridge to rectify all input regardless of rotation? And furthermore, a rectifying bridge makes the output DC current pulsate?

Ok, but, what about all the other stuff I said about when the alternator randomly reverses direction? Clearly it matters or so many alternators wouldn't be designed to work in only one direction as you pointed out with the windmills.

But having a system of gears and pulleys is inefficient and out takes away a lot of energy from friction and costs more money and is a lot more complicated, surely there must be a way to use diodes to cerrect it. If I have wind, well, the wind can rotate in all sorts of directions at different angles at different times and make eddies and negative pressure and ect. If something's blowing every which-way in the wind but I want a constant current in one direction, how would I do that without a bunch of pulleys and gears? Do I only need one diode? Oh wait a minute, so it requires work for electricity to pass through the magnetic field when the generator isn't rotating from an external source?

Ok so I have another question: What if I have a situation where the rotor can rotate in either direction? I'll still get an AC current, but won't the polarization reverse every time the rotation goes from being clockwise to counterclockwise? How would I rectify that to make a single DC current through the whole thing? Would I need a diode on both sides of the circuit, both going into and coming out of the alternator, and, would both diodes have the same orientation? And then, if I have one wire running through the whole alternator, is there any sort of phase differential caused by different parts of the wire being exposed to different parts of the magnetic field? Or, do phase differentials only occur when all the wires are separate for each magnet in the stator? And that smoothing capacitor...If I'm not mistaken, a charge regulator converts a lower DC current to a higher DC current by absorbing a bit of current at a time and then re-releasing it in the form of higher-voltage pulses. So the smoothing capacitor takes those pulses and then turns them into a regular DC current? Why wouldn't charge regulators automatically be built with that? Also if the pulses are occurring at like 1000000 times a second, why would it matter if I have a continuous current vs a pulsating current?

Exactly, ferromagnetic materials don't need electricity to be magnets, so what exactly is drawing current in the generator? The coils simply existing don't draw current from anything...unless the magnetic field acts as a cathode on one end and an anode on another end, while the magnet itself acts as an electrolyte?

But I though that's why I had a charge regulator. Are you saying a diode can both rectify and regulate a current at the same time? I also can't figure out why a generator draws energy if all it does is complete a circuit when it's sitting stationary. Do ferromagnetic materials somehow use up energy to create a static magnetic field?

So that's why I need the diodes is what you're saying. But why not just have a generator then instead of an alternator if I have batteries?

That's a lot of good information, thanks for that. But, is there any particular reason why the magnetic field should rotate relative to the structure of the device instead of the coiled armature? It seems like the design would be simpler if I didn't need a diode array. Can an alternator charge a dead battery too? The input isn't going to be constant, at times it will be 0 which means the lights are going to drain power from the batteries until there's none left. I want to construct something myself to also just get general experience with electrical engineering. I don't know why, but for some reason mechanical engineering doesn't go very far with circuitry and I always thought it was important to know electrical engineering for understanding modern technology, not to mention that physics like wave mechanics and electromagnetics could be used to develop new circuitry components. But, is there any particular reason why the magnetic field should rotate relative to the structure of the device instead of the coiled armature? It seems like the design would be simpler if I didn't need a diode array. Can an alternator charge a dead battery too?

I see nothing that would cause the current to alternate and I already said I want the lights to be powered consistently, I would assume DC. Doesn't matter what's powering the generator. Doesn't matter if its wind, doesn't matter if its water, all that matters is that the generator turns and it can turn at different rates. Then that would be a reason why a charge controller is the best option. Because nature is chaotic? Because wind picks up and dies down? Because water splashes into itself and forms eddies? Because most kinetic motion changes? because friction exists and causes energy loss over time? No, current is also determined by the voltage applied to the lights, not just their resistance. Assume its a spaghetti monster, doesn't matter, all that matters is there's something turning it. But if you must know, it would work best for a renewable source of energy like wind or water but it isn't limited to those types of circumstances. It's a device I'm constructing for the simple direct measurement of energy based on rotor frequency or angular velocity using lights to quantize and categorize the energy into different bins based on which light flashes at which time so I can use the data on excel without doing a bunch of programming to have it directly hook up to the computer and record the data. If it's sophisticated enough yeah, but I still want to control how it deals with excess energy because its completely possible that there will be a huge spontaneous burst of energy that makes the rotor rotate at huge speeds, and I don't want anything to overheat either.

Because who knows how fast the rotor will turn, who would want electricity in a circuit with a current that changes unpredictably by the second? The power source as I said is a generator with a stator and a rotor, like a turbine. Lights and a way to get rid of electricity with resistors automatically imply a resistive load and the use of capacitors or batteries to resist variability in the current from the generator throughout the circuit would imply a capacitive load to form a multiple load circuit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_controller Google "turbine" and you'll get the gist of what I'm trying to do. I have a generator with a stator and rotor, ok? Now, that generator can and will have a rotor rotating at an infinite number of different possible angular velocities, ok? But, I want to turn that varying current from the different possible inputs of power into a constant current to feed lights that are powered consistently for a duration of time.

"All in all" I've given you a basic scenario that I would expect anyone with experience in electrical engineering to understand. A generator with a stator and rotator generates electricity into batteries which power lights over a duration of time greater than the duration of time that it took to charge the betteries. That idea is a very simple setup, don't over think it and insert detail where there is none. What's hard is when you and everyone else keeps arguing over what the "best" solution is to not over-charging the batteries and making sure the battery output has the proper voltage. The water heater is what I got from looking up a model of a charge regulator. It doesn't have to be a water heater but it has to direct the energy into some auxiliary load which is exactly what I was talking about before, that excess energy still has to go somewhere. And since water has a high specific heat I'm guessing that's why they thought a small water heater wouldn't be a bad idea.

So if there's no flow, why would a charge regulator need a water heater or resistors to get rid of extra energy from the flow of electricity that surpassed he limit of what would otherwise overcharge a battery?

Well the explosion is what I wan to avoid, but I'm having trouble figuring out what a charge regulator does differently because doesn't a charge regulator have to do SOMETHING with all that extra energy? I guess a DC-DC converter would do the trick from what you describe, but it would have to be a variable converter, like DCX-DC, no matter what input it had for voltage, the output voltage would be the same which means it would both have to do something with excess energy in the form of resistors but also have capacitors for when a lower voltage is input, I would think at least. Would a DCX-DC converter be the best option for something like a generator with a rotor that could rotate at all sorts of different angular velocities? Otherwise a charge controller is the other option. A charge controller redirects extra energy to some kind of water heater, and I know water has a high specific heat, but couldn't that water heater just overheat? I'm thinking about something that deals with wind and sun and rain and other kinetic movement, energy on a macroscopic scale but not a factory scale, something that's no bigger than a person but no smaller than the palm of your hand.

Well I guess it seems resistors are inevitable. If I have a generator who's output I want adapted to different voltages while making sure the batteries don't over charge then a variable resistor seems like a good option.

I'm still not sure by what you mean when you say "there is no need," because electricity and a battery isn't conscious, it doesn't know that a battery is full, how would a battery automatically know its full and not overcharge? How was it already taken care of? Are you saying a charge regulator prevents overcharging in the first place? Then what does it do with all that excess energy? Then, since the only thing I can think of dealing with excess energy is resistors, why wouldn't I just have resistors in place of a charge regulator?

Ok, so have the wires from the stator hook up to a series of parallel batteries, then have those batteries hook up to a DC-DC converter and have that hook up to the lower voltage lights. But, the last thing to consider is overcharging. A generator on its own can overcharge a battery given enough power and time, I need a way to first: have the circuitry recognize when the batteries are full, then second, only let excess energy out in some way so that the batteries stay full after energy is taken from them, maybe heat through specific resistor-vents that lead into the air or a light source emits the energy into higher frequency photons.

Well lets say I have a small generator with a stator and rotor, now how easy is it? I'm still not seeing an answer to my question. I want to store energy, then, without losing a bunch of it fro resistors, release that energy a little bit at a time.

Resistors are sort of the opposite of what I'm going for. I want to be able to collect large amounts of energy in a short time, store that energy, then release it over a longer period of time to power a lower-power-necessity series of lights. I'm sure there's ways this is done otherwise every device would explode as soon as the circuit was completed with a charged battery.

What about some kind of rechargeable battery? But then I have the same problem of controlling the current, but at least it wouldn't automatically decay exponentially.

I don't know a lot about electrical engineering but I'm trying to design a simple circuit system. Lets say I have a source generating electricity in a circuit and say just as a random number 30 amps from one second of electrical current are stored in a capacitor. How would I then release that electrical energy more slowly to power a small light at 10 amps a second for 3 seconds?

The result I'm looking for is what I tried to say before. To understand it, I will clear up what I mean and say "inverse of the inverse." If I took f(x), and then took the inverse of that function, I would get inverse of f(x) or f-1(x). Now, if I take the inverse of the inverse, or the inverse of f-1(x), I get f(x). With that concept in mind, it seems intuitive that there would be a formula which shows that the inverse of the integral of f-1(x) is the integral of f(x). I know that's not actually right, because when I test it with f(x)=x^2 and sqrt(x) the theorem doesn't work.

Not really but if its the only thing I guess I'll take it. I was thinking more in terms of logic that the "proof without words" theorem would yield something nice like "the inverse of the integral of f-1(x) - the integral of f(x)." But, if that that complicated theorem is the best it gets then that's the best it gets.