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Manbench Industries; Purveyors of general mayhem since 1994, a blog to follow the crazed, possibly deranged projects and emotive musings, of an undergraduate engineer, and an apprentice organ builder who have always felt they were born in the wrong age. Follow us as we, re-write history, learn lost skills, discover strange new worlds, break things, rant at things, mend things, make new things and generally find ways of passing the day instead of doing "proper work" !

Wednesday 12 December 2012

Generator Experiment

A school project now - this was built for my A-Level Physics experiment where I decided to build a dynamo and measure the effects of increasing magnetic field strength, number of coils and velocity of rotation upon the voltage created. The dynamo was quite crude and very inefficient - the windings I made had wooden, as opposed to iron cores - the cast iron I had to do the job was so hard it barely scratched by the big power hacksaw I tried to cut it with - I suspect it was chilled. The AC voltage coming from the dynamo was measured on a oscilloscope,; the wave created is shown below. Anyway, I powered the generator by a big 12V motor with a field coil needing two power packs to run it. With the two power packs running, I was taking 460V from the mains, with the dynamo itself producing somewhere in the region of 0.4V, equating to an efficiency of somewhere around 0.08% - how's that for solving the energy crisis!




The Engineer.

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