Back To The Future

Today is Back To The Future Day!

Although my car is not a DeLorean, it does have gullwing doors, and I am pretty sure I'm going to get the power up to 1.21 jiggawatts.

For the past year I haven't posted any additional content as I've been exploring some unknowns on the electrical side of reconditioning, from scratch. What I mean by this is that I am in the process of not only making the motor that I've been designing for over a decade, but I have been researching Super Capacitors as the power source, primarily with graphene. I have some novel ideas about graphene production embedded in epoxides or cyanoacrylates, which I will be posting possibly on a new youtube channel of how I make them from scratch using chemistry, possibly utilizing electronics a bit (for instance I use ultrasonic homogenizers to shear graphite apart to form layers of graphene). I've been building out my fumehood, as you all know, epoxies and superglues stink real bad, and the reactions to make them should be handled with care (cyanoacrylates require cyanide if that gives you any scope of what I am attempting in my living room).

So not only am I planning on building the motor, but also the power source and the associated electronics..

I also had to move (via pushing) my car into the garden area as the roof of the house gets replaced in preparation for El Niño. I quite like it there..

Moved

I moved!
Out of the apartment complex, across the street, and 5 houses down.. not bad eh?
A converted attic that gets way too hot, but a portable AC helped fix it..

I actually had to go to the ER about a month ago for an infection which slowed me down a bit, but not much has actually been done to the car.. still thinking about prototype electric motors to build..

Last night I went to the bike shop down the street and asked help to push the car from a guy for some beer, and he shows up with 3 others! Fairly funny initially, guys taking selfies inside the car and saying that it smelled like their dad.. which is probably not far from the truth..

It is now in a gravel driveway, which isn't great for working on, but I was still given permission since it doesn't use oil (I'm a great salesman, eh?).. Three 25 year old females live under me, and luckily with this not moving we wont have to shuffle too much.. I have yet to get a reaction from one of them (due to working.. I'm on-call again so sort of stuck at home) regarding how macho it looks, but I am sure there will be conversations in the near future with them and their boyfriends.

SPICE and On-Call

Being on-call this week made it so I could not spend time in the car (pretending like I am driving) because I do not get reception in the underground garage. Which brings me to another point.. part way through the week I got my lease renewal. They want to charge me 35% more per month on a year lease. I spent some time searching and emailing some people that may let me do more of what I want to do.. which I have been able to do here, more or less, but hopefully for less money. Plus being more secluded is nice and all, I haven't really used downtown San Jose like the university kids do.. I also emailed about 40 acres in the mountains, but the requested deposit is just too much.. On top of that I would still have to build a quick structure, like a yurt..
Anyways, here's a slight modification to the previous simulation, which now is essentially a bifilar (two windings, say, on a rotor of a motor)

This is going to be the main circuit I'll be working on. The 'difficult' part is that I will need a big IGBT module (or several depending on how many ampres) for each winding I plan on pulsing.. luckily that is only 2 or 3, with the same amount of stators that I should be able to wind up in series/parallel and thus only use a single IGBT per winding..

More circuits to come..

Electronics Review

Haven't posted in a couple days, because not much has been done..
I've taken apart the controller and essentially analyzed the circuitry. Nothing major, they have one chip of their own brand, but essentially it's a PWM with two quad op-amps for error compensation and the accelerator input.. oh, and it's all hand drawn from the late 70s.. Retro

No ground plane, as they typically are not found on old circuit boards..

With some light.. on the upper right, the left is the PWM chip with the two quad op amps in the middle and far right.. Nothing really interesting is going on in here.. it's old..

I was able to dig up some 'old' LTSPICE files I had on my linux box (I run it using wine) and got the basic ones I was after to run on my work laptop (mac)..

So.. what is this circuit you may ask? It's a Back EMF Collector.. essentially it will be used as part of the controller.. an optical (rotary) encoder will tell me which phase to send a pulse of current through, when I am not sending a pulse, I can drain the induced current that is in it to do something useful rather than creating heat. The one downside to doing this, beyond needing to have the control circuitry to handle high voltage spikes, is that if there is no remaining induction taking place than the inductor (motor winding) has to start from 0 to charge up again, and comes across lots of resistance. you can see in the graph that the green line starts to taper off when it gets saturated.

Current pipe dream: Take some super capacitors, put it through a flyback with some feedback from the accelerator cable to get the right voltage.. hooked up with the rotary encoder to specify what rotor/stator phase to pulse, through some IGBTs, and when not pulsing take the current back in, buck it down to a charging/working voltage of the super capacitors, and feed it back in..

Oh.. this may become an electronics blog for a little while, and I'm okay with that. 

Gift Certificates and Renting Tools, pt 3

I hauled the final 4 batteries (minus the one accessory battery still in the front) to the auto parts store, having a difficult time after an intersection because of more buckling to the service cart. relieved, I accept my gift card and rent a tie rod puller to attempt to get the bearings out.. come back, but it doesn't fit, I take it back and try to get a puller of the right size, but it appears to already be rented out. so.. done for the day..
BTW, one of the bearings, the smaller on eon the commutator end, does spin a bit more than the flywheel end, which means it does not have as much grease or is already worn out, and should be replaced..
I am looking into materials needed to build (at least a small test) my motor design.

Gift Certificates and Renting Tools, pt 2

I move everything out of my way, including a giant 36"x18"x24" unused vivarium, out of my way so I can stroll the service cart to the balcony and pile one 4 more batteries. When I move it inside I hear the same sound as buckling/bending sheet metal back and forth, but shrug it off since everything seemed okay, probably just caught it at a bad spot. Through my living room and kitchen, out to the walkway, down there, right past the elevator, another right, a left, then to an elevator that actually has street access. Around the corner and down 3/4 blocks to the auto parts store. He asks if I have my gift certificate with me, must've forgot it, so I get another, this one with $20. He has me bring them in the back as there was a better shelf there to load them up on, good thing no more tonight because my arms are feeling it. I then 'rent' the 7-ton puller, which has a bigger reach, to attempt to pull off the bellhousing. This guy is ~$70, and was told that it's a 48hour 'rental', and no late fee, you just buy it at that point. I told him I'll be back in a half hour.

 Fits snug.. Yes, I know I did not configure it for the 3 jaw correctly.. This is how it was out of the box, and the one I would have to adjust to make it a correct 3 jaw was tighter than what my fingers could get off, and my appropriate size wrench was 20 ft away. So I did what anybody would have done, I made it work.

 And work it did!

The full rotor, without the mess of the bellhousing. I attempted to nab the bearings, but I think I would need the smaller size again, which I might try to do tomorrow when I bring the "last" load of batteries (there is still one for the accessories in the car). Even though the bearings seem pretty good(less than 1500 miles good), I just want to examine everything. I can see rust on the shaft near where the bellhousing came off. and I am pretty sure there should not be conduction between all of the windings, which there is: that is actually my main concern.

I'll examine the rotor a little more tonight, but nothing much beyond that.

Oh.. the current plan is to manufacture the motor I've been designing for the past decade, and not re-use this one.. I am sure it will go to some Bradley (GTE?) fan that either needs/wants a replacement, or someone building one up.. nothing better than original parts when restoring; I am reconditioning, two very different ways of completing the same problem.

Gift Certificates and Renting Tools, pt 1

It's Tuesday, and no call back from the manager of the auto parts store by the time I get back home,which was relatively early because I was in at work by 8:30am and ate lunch at my desk. So, I change out of my button up shirt and slick pants into jeans, running shoes, and an old black RedHat tshirt, while still wearing my Speedmaster, and head on down a few blocks to check in with them. When I arrived the same guy who I dealt with was at the counter and we caught up fast on what I've done so far, etc, we followed up on the batteries and he went in back of the new batteries where his manager was chillin' at and talked for a minute or two, came back, and said no more than 5 batteries per day, but he can give me a gift card today worth the 8 batteries I brought in so far. After having issues with one card reader for 5 mins he jumped on another box and that seemed to work well, and I had a $40 gift card. I also "rented" a puller for the flywheel adapter. "Rented" means you pay full price, but get a full refund from them upon return.. something like $41, I told him I'd be back in a half hour..

 This puller had two different settings on the arm, via moving a bolt, and could be either 2 or 3 jaw..

 I soon discovered the 2 jaw worked out better for a single person. The difficulty was with the size of the adapter. I actually had to start it by prying it out a bit jus to get a good grasp on it, but using this tool was much better than a flat head.. a hammer pry or crow bar would have worked, but I have neither (my frog shelves are built using dovetails, so I used a mallet and chisels.. yeah!). Took less than 20 mins to get the thing off. It looks like the key is a separate object (common, and is usually one of the hardest steels you will ever find) but seems stuck in place (probably from the massive amount of torque)  on the shaft, I didn't play around with this much. I tried pulling the bellhousing off, no luck.. tried using the puller to get the bellhousing off, and it was just a tad too small for this. I return the current puller and let the guy know that I got the adapter off, but the bellhousing is still on there, so when I bring my batch of 4 batteries tomorrow, I will "rent" the same kind of puller, but for flywheels, at the same time to try and get this thing off.
Should be all for the night, I might pry at the bellhousing a little bit longer, but if there is a right tool for the job, use it!