generator

106 Articles

Bosch Starter Motor Freed From Mercedes Prison

January 24, 2025 by 79 Comments

Vehicle alternators are interesting beasts. Produced on a massive scale, these electric machines are available for a minimum of cost and contain all kinds of great parts: some power electronics and a belt-driven generator are generally standard fare. This generator can also be used as a motor with only minor changes to the machine as a whole, so thanks to economies of scale it’s possible to get readily-available, powerful, compact, and cheap motors for all kinds of projects using alternators as a starting point. [LeoDJ] noticed that this starter motor in a modern Mercedes had some interesting benefits beyond all of these perks, but it took a bit more work to get up and running than a typical alternator would have.

The motor, built by Bosch, can be found in the Mercedes E200 EQ Boost. This is a hybrid car, but different than something like a Prius in that it doesn’t have an electric motor capable of powering the car on its own. Instead it uses a combination starter motor/alternator/generator to provide extra power to the engine during acceleration, increasing efficiency and performance. It can also charge the small battery bank when the car slows down. Vehicles that use this system need much beefier alternators than a standard car, but liberating it from the car means that it has much more power available than a typical alternator would.

There were a number of issues to solve, though. Being that the motor/alternator has to do all of this extra work (and that it came out of a car whose brand is known for being tedious to work on in the first place) it is much more complicated than an off-the-shelf alternator. [LeoDJ] has been able to get his to spin by communicating with it over the CAN bus, but there’s still some work to be done before it goes into something like an impressively fast electric bicycle.

Thanks to [RoganDawes] for the tip!

Hydroelectric Generator Gets Power From Siphoning

January 21, 2025 by 43 Comments

Siphons are one of those physics phenomena that, like gyroscopes, non-Newtonian fluids, and electricity, seem almost magical. Thanks to atmospheric pressure, simply filling a tube with liquid and placing the end of the tube below the liquid level of a container allows it to flow against gravity, over a barrier, and down into another container without any extra energy inputs once the siphon is started. They’re not just tricks, though; siphons have practical applications as well, such as in siphon-powered hydroelectric turbine.

This is an iteration of [Beyond the Print]’s efforts to draw useful energy from a local dam with an uneconomic amount of water pressure and/or volume for a typical hydroelectric power station. One of his earlier attempts involved a water wheel but this siphon-based device uses a more efficient impeller design instead, and it also keeps the generator dry as well. Using 3″ PVC piping to channel the siphon, as well as a short length of thinner pipe to attach a shop vac for priming the siphon, water is drawn from the reservoir, up the pipe, and then down through the impeller which spins a small DC generator.

This design is generating about 9 V open-circuit, and we’d assume there’s enough power available to charge a phone or power a small microcontroller device. However, there’s a ton of room for improvement here. The major problem [Beyond the Print] is currently experiencing is getting air into the system and having the siphon broken, which he’s solved temporarily by adding a bucket at the outflow. This slows down the water though, so perhaps with any air leaks mitigated the power generation capabilities will be greatly increased.

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E-Bike Motor Gets New Life As Hydro Plant

January 5, 2025 by 54 Comments

For economic reasons, not every lake with a dam can support a hydroelectric power plant. Some rivers or creeks are dammed for flood control or simply for recreation, and don’t have the flow rate or aren’t deep enough to make the investment of a grid-scale generation facility worthwhile. But for those of us with a few spare parts around and access to a small lake, sometimes it’s possible to generate a usable amount of energy with just a bit of effort.

[Beyond the Tint] is building this mostly as a proof-of-concept, starting with a 1,000W hub motor from an e-bike that’s been removed from its wheel. A 3D-printed waterwheel attachment is installed in its place, and the fixed shaft is attached to a homemade ladder-looking mechanism that allows the entire generator to be lowered into the flow of a moving body of water, in this case, a small stream. A bridge rectifier converts the AC from the hub motor (now a generator) into DC, and after a few measurements and trials, [Beyond the Tint] produced over 30W with the first prototype.

A second prototype was made with feedback from the first video he produced, this time with an enclosed paddlewheel. This didn’t appear to make much difference at first, but a more refined impeller may make a difference in future prototypes. Small-scale hydropower is a fairly popular challenge to tackle, especially in the off-grid community. With access to even a small flowing stream and enough elevation change, it’s possible to build something like this generator out of parts from an old washing machine.

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Building A Generator That Runs Off Hose Power

November 29, 2024 by 68 Comments

[Paul Junkin] bought a curious product off the Internet. It was supposed to generate electricity when hooked up to a running hose. Only, it didn’t do a very good job. His solution was straightforward—he built his own hose-powered generator that actually worked.

The design uses a turbine hooked up to a small motor acting as a generator. To maximize the transfer of energy from the stream of water to the blades of the turbine, the hose is hooked up to a convergent nozzle. [Paul] does a great job explaining the simple physics at play, as well as the iterative design process he used to get to the final product. He calculates the best-case power coming out of his hose around 50 watts, so for his turbine to collect 22 watts is a win, and it’s good enough to charge a phone or run some LED lighting.

Of course, this isn’t a practical generator if you have to pay for the water, and there are other solutions that will get you less wet. Still, credit where it’s due—this thing does make power when you hook it up to a hose. We’ve seen some slightly less ridiculous concepts in this space before, though.

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Small Steam Generator Creates Educational Experience

October 27, 2024 by 13 Comments

Steam turbines have helped drive a large chunk of our technological development over the last century or so, and they’ll always make for interesting DIY. [Hyperspace Pirate] built a small turbine and boiler in his garage, turning fire into flowing electrons, and learning a bunch in the process.

[Hyperspace Pirate] based the turbine design on 3D printed Pelton-style turbines he had previously experimented with, but milled it from brass using a CNC router. A couple of holes had to be drilled in the side of the rotor to balance it. The shaft drives a brushless DC motor to convert the energy from the expanding steam into electricity.

To avoid the long heat times required for a conventional boiler, [Hyperspace Pirate] decided to use a flash boiler. This involves heating up high-pressure water in a thin coil of copper tube, causing the water to boil as it flows down the tube. To produce the high-pressure water feed the propane tank for the burner was also hooked up to the water tank to pressurize it, removing the need for a separate pump or compressed air source. This setup allows the turbine to start producing power within twelve seconds of lighting the burner — significantly faster than a conventional boiler.

Throughout the entire video [Hyperspace Pirate] shows his calculation for the design and tests, making for a very informative demonstration. By hooking up a variable load and Arduino to the rectified output of the motor, he was able to measure the output power and efficiency. It came out to less than 1% efficiency for turning propane into electricity, not accounting for the heat loss of the boiler. The wide gaps between the turbine and housing, as well as the lack of a converging/diverging nozzle on the input of the turbine are likely big contributing factors to the low efficiency.

Like many of his other projects, the goal was the challenge of the project, not practicality or efficiency. From a gyro-stabilized monorail, to copper ingots from algaecide and and a DIY cryocooler, he has sure done some interesting ones.

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Trees Turned Into Wind Turbines, Non-Destructively

September 18, 2024 by 57 Comments

Trees and forests are an incredibly important natural resource — not only for lumber and agricultural products, but also because they maintain a huge amount of biodiversity, stabilize their local environments, and help combat climate change as a way to sequester atmospheric carbon. But the one thing they don’t do is make electricity. At least, not directly. [Concept Crafted Creations] is working on solving this issue by essentially turning an unmodified tree into a kind of wind turbine.

The idea works by first attaching a linear generator to the trunk of a tree. This generator has a hand-wound set of coils on the outside, with permanent magnets on a shaft that can travel up and down inside the set of coils. The motion to power the generator comes from a set of ropes connected high up in the tree’s branches. When the wind moves the branches, the ropes transfer the energy to a 3D printed rotational mechanism attached to a gearbox, which then pumps the generator up and down. The more ropes, branches, and generators attached to a tree the more electricity can be produced.

Admittedly, this project is still a proof-of-concept, although the currently deployed prototype seems promising. [Concept Crafted Creations] hopes to work with others building similar devices to improve on the idea and build more refined prototypes in the future. It’s also not the only way of building a wind energy generator outside of the traditional bladed design, either. It’s possible to build a wind-powered generator with no moving parts that uses vibrations instead of rotational motion as well.

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You Can Build A Little Car That Goes Farther Than You Push It

July 11, 2024 by 25 Comments

Can you build a car that travels farther than you push it? [Tom Stanton] shows us that you can, using a capacitor and some nifty design tricks.

[Tom]’s video shows us the construction of a small 3D printed trike with a curious drivetrain. There’s a simple generator on board, which charges a capacitor when the trike is pushed along the ground. When the trike is let go, however, this generator instead acts as a motor, using energy stored in the capacitor to drive the trike further.

When put to the test by [Tom], both a freewheeling car and the capacitor car are pushed up to a set speed. But the capacitor car goes farther. The trick is simple – the capacitor car can go further because it has more energy. But how?

It’s all because more work is being done to push the capacitor car up to speed. It stores energy in the capacitor while it’s being accelerated by the human pushing it. In contrast, after being pushed, the freewheeling car merely coasts to a stop as it loses kinetic energy. However, the capacitor car has similar kinetic energy plus the energy stored in its capacitor, which it can use to run its motor.

It’s a neat exploration of some basic physics, and useful learning if you’ve ever wondered about the prospects of perpetual motion machines.

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