induction

42 Articles

A Look Inside An Old-School Synchroscope

September 28, 2022 by 7 Comments

There’s nothing quite like old-school electrical gear, especially the stuff associated with power distribution. There’s something about the chunky, heavy construction, the thick bakelite cases, and the dials you can read from across the room. Double points for something that started life behind the Iron Curtain, as this delightful synchroscope appears to have.

So what exactly is a synchroscope, you ask? As [DiodeGoneWild] explains (in the best accent a human being has ever had), synchroscopes are used to indicate when two AC power sources are in phase with each other. This is important in power generation and distribution, where it just wouldn’t be a good idea to just connect a freshly started generator to a stable power grid. This synchroscope has a wonderfully robust mechanism inside, with four drive coils located 90° apart on a circular stator. Inside that is a moving coil attached to the meter’s needle, which makes this an induction motor that stops turning when the two input currents are in phase with each other.

The meter is chock full of engineering goodies, like the magnetic brake that damps the needle, and the neat inductive coupling method used to provide current to the moving coil. [DiodeGoneWild] does a great job explaining how the meter works, and does a few basic tests that show us the 60-odd years since this thing was made haven’t caused any major damage. We’re eager to see it put to the full test soon.

This is just the latest in a series of cool teardowns by [DiodeGoneWild]. He recently treated us to a glimpse inside an old-ish wattmeter, and took a look at friggin’ laser-powered headlights, too.

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Induction Heater Uses New Coil

June 8, 2022 by 14 Comments

Induction cook tops are among the most efficient ways of cooking in the home that are commercially available to the average person. Since the cook surface uses magnetic fields to generate heat in the cookware itself, there is essentially no heat wasted. There are some other perks too, such as faster cooking times and more fine control, not to mention that it’s possible to build your own induction stove. All you need is some iron, wire, and a power source, and you can have something like this homemade induction cooker.

This induction heater has a trick up its sleeve, too. Instead of using an air coil to generate heat in the cookware, this one uses an iron core instead. The project’s creator [mircemk] built an air core induction stove in the past, and this new one is nearly identical with the exception of the addition of the iron core. This allows for the use of less wire, and uses a driver circuit called a Mazzilli ZVS driver running through some power MOSFETs to power the device. A couple inductors limit the current to 20A, but it appears to work just as well as the previous stove.

This build puts a homemade induction stove well within reach of anyone with an appropriate power supply and enough wire and inductors to build the coils. [mircemk] has made somewhat of a name for himself involving project that use various coils of wire, too, like this project we featured recently which uses two overlapping air-core coils to build an effective metal detector.

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Measuring current draw of home shop tools

Using Homebrew Coils To Measure Mains Current, And Taking The Circuit Breaker Challenge

September 12, 2021 by 21 Comments

Like many hackers, [Matthias Wandel] has a penchant for measuring the world around him, and quantifying the goings-on in his home is a bit of a hobby. And so when it came time to sense the current flowing in the wires of his house, he did what any of us would do: he built his own current sensing system.

What’s that you say? Any sane hacker would buy something like a Kill-a-Watt meter, or even perhaps use commercially available current transformers? Perhaps, but then one wouldn’t exactly be hacking, would one? [Matthias] opted to roll his own sensors for quite practical reasons: commercial meters don’t quite have the response time to catch the start-up spikes he was interested in seeing, and clamp-on current transformers require splitting the jacket on the nonmetallic cabling used in most residential wiring — doing so tends to run afoul of building codes. So his sensors were simply coils of wire shaped to fit the outside of the NM cable, with a bit of filtering to provide a cleaner signal in the high-noise environment of a lot of switch-mode power supplies.

Fed through an ADC board into a Raspberry Pi, [Matthias]’ sensor system did a surprisingly good job of catching the start-up surge of some tools around the shop. That led to the entertaining “Circuit Breaker Challenge” part of the video below, wherein we learn just what it really takes to pop the breaker on a 15-Amp branch circuit. Spoiler alert: it’s a lot.

Speaking of staying safe with mains current, we’ve covered a little bit about how circuit protection works before. If you need a deeper dive into circuit breakers, we’ve got that too.

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Keep Coffee Warm Through Induction Heating

April 11, 2021 by 13 Comments

Transformers have an obvious use for increasing or decreasing the voltage in AC systems, but they have many other esoteric uses as well. Electric motors and generators are functionally similar and can be modeled as if they are transformers, but the truly interesting applications are outside these industrial settings. Wireless charging is essentially an air-core transformer that allows power to flow through otherwise empty space, and induction cooking uses a similar principle to induce current flow in pots and pans. And, in this case, coffee mugs.

[Sajjad]’s project is an effort to keep his coffee warm while it sits on his desk. To build this special transformer he places his mug inside a coil of thick wire which is connected to a square wave generator. A capacitor sits in parallel with the coil of wire which allows the device to achieve resonance at a specific tuned frequency. Once at that frequency, the coil of wire efficiently generates eddy currents in the metal part of the coffee mug and heats the coffee with a minimum of input energy.

While this project doesn’t work for ceramic mugs, [Sajjad] does demonstrate it with a metal spoon in the mug. While it doesn’t heat up to levels high enough to melt solder, it works to keep coffee warm in a pinch if a metal mug isn’t available. He also plans to upgrade it so it takes up slightly less space on his desk. For now, though, it can easily keep his mug of coffee hot while it sits on his test bench.

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DIY Induction Heater Draws 1.4 KW And Gets Metal Hot

November 29, 2020 by 16 Comments

Induction heaters can make conductive objects incredibly hot by generating eddy currents within the metal. They’re used in a wide variety of industrial processes, from furnaces to welders and even heat treatments. [Schematix] whipped up his own design, and put it through its paces on the bench.

The build in question is a fairly compact design, roughly shoebox-sized when fitted with its six-turn coil. Running off anything from 12 V to 48 V, the heater put out at a massive 1.4 kW in testing. At this power level, the high current draw led the power traces to heat up enough to melt solder, and eventually burn out. [Schematix] plans to rebuild the heater with added copper wiring along these traces to support the higher power levels without failure.

The heater is able to quickly heat ferrous metals, though was not able to meaningfully dump power into aluminium under testing. This is unsurprising, as non-ferrous metals primarily undergo only Joule heating from induction, forgoing the hysteresis portion of heat transfer due to being non-magnetic. However, modification to the design could improve performance for those eager to work with non-ferrous materials.

We’ve seen a few induction heaters before, for purposes as varied as soldering and casting. Video after the break.

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A Clock From An Electricity Meter

October 29, 2020 by 4 Comments

Electric utilities across the world have been transitioning their meters from the induction analog style with a distinctive spinning disc to digital “smart” meters which aren’t as aesthetically pleasing but do have a lot of benefits for utilities and customers alike. For one, meter readers don’t need to visit each meter every month because they are all networked together and can download usage data remotely. For another, it means a lot of analog meters are now available for projects such as this clock from [Monta].

The analog meters worked by passing any electricity used through a small induction motor which spun at a rate proportional to the amount of energy passing through it. This small motor spun a set of dials via gearing in order to keep track of the energy usage in the home or business. To run the clock, [Monta] connected a stepper motor with a custom transmission to those dials for the clock face because it wasn’t possible to spin the induction motor fast enough to drive the dials. An Arduino controls that stepper motor, but can’t simply drive the system in a linear fashion because it needs to skip a large portion of the “minutes” dials every hour. A similar problem arises for the “hours” dials, but a little bit of extra code solves this problem as well.

Once the actual clock is finished, [Monta] put some finishing touches on it such as backlighting in the glass cover and a second motor to spin the induction motor wheel to make the meter look like it’s running. It’s a well-polished build that makes excellent use of some antique hardware, much like one of his other builds we’ve seen which draws its power from a Stirling engine.

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Simple Induction Heater Helps With Homebrew Shrink-Fitting

October 26, 2020 by 14 Comments

Machinists have a lot of neat shop tricks, but one especially interesting one is shrink-fitting tools. Shrink-fitting achieves an interference fit between tool and holder by creating a temperature difference between the two before assembly. Once everything returns to temperature, the two parts may as well be welded together.

The easiest way to shrink-fit machine tooling is with induction heating, and commercial rigs exist for doing the job. But [Roetz 4.0] decided to build his own shrink-fitting heater, and the results are pretty impressive. The induction heater itself is very simple — a 48 volt, 20 amp power supply, an off-the-shelf zero-voltage switching (ZVS) driver, and a heavy copper coil. When the coil is powered up, any metal within is quickly and evenly heated by virtue of the strong magnetic flux in the coil.

To use the shrinker, [Roetz 4.0] starts with a scrupulously clean tool holder, bored slightly undersized for the desired tool. Inside the coil, the steel tool holder quickly heats to a lovely deep brown color, meaning it has gotten up to the requisite 250-300°C. The tool is quickly dropped into the now-expanded bore, which quickly shrinks back around it. The advantage of this method over a collet or a chuck is clear in the video below: practically zero runout, and the tool is easily released after another run through the heater.

You say you’ve got no need for shrink-fitting tools? How about stuck bolts? Induction heaters work great there too.

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