Wind energy - Coil winding

I figure, if I want to understand coils, I need some kind of consistency in a test device.

One of the biggest issues in backyard science, is all the noise that comes with the data. This noise is often caused by changing too many things at once, or there being to many variables. If we change more than one thing, it can become impossible to determine which change brought about the different result. This can lead us to wacky habits, superstitions, or carrying baggage left over from some meaningless bit of the last test we did.

One change, one test.

Noise can also come in the form of sloppy engineering. If your race car is held together with tape, the last very slow lap on those new tyres might be caused, not by the tires, but by the fact that your gearbox fell off.

With that in mind, I thought I should make something a bit more robust than my previous device.

I made this out of, you guessed it, PVC.

I also discovered my rare earth (neodymium) magnets will stick nicely to a nut. These are the same magnets reputed to hold together with 7kg of force required to separate them.

They really are amazingly strong.

Add a bearing and a lock nut, and the neodymium magnet rotatey bit is done.

I'm never sure what tech the universe is aware of, so I'll err on the side of caution and mention locknuts.

 If you get two nuts on a threaded shaft, and tighten them toward each other you can "lock" them into position on the shaft. They will no longer spin on the shaft until such a time as you release the pressure between them. They will spin with the shaft allowing us to rotate our magnets by placing them on the nuts.

It seems, that a large plastic hose fitting has a tapered section to grip the hose. This creates a pretty good seat for a bearing.

Placing the shaft into place, then tightening the plastic "nut" presses the bearing firmly into its seat.

Giving us a nice reliable coil jig to test different wire thicknesses, and different numbers of turns on our coils.

Shown here with a wacky experimental coil that did nothing, the only thing left to do is force a flexible plastic tube over the end of the threaded shaft, and stick the other end into a power drill's chuck.

The drill should give us consistent revolutions per minute to keep our test at least a bit scientific.

Wind energy - Coiled again

I've been working hard at making more electrons do their thing.
But it's not working.
I'm not sure why.

I made some nice coils out of the coil I made before. I unravelled it and thought I should try to explore the relationship between the number of turns on my coil, and what I see on my multimeter.

I started by making a cardboard tube coil winder. I figured it would be best to at least have the size of the coil consistent. I found a few different designs to make a coil winder and all the good ones shared a few points.

The most important aspect to a coil maker is that you should be able to dismantle it a bit to let the coil out.

This looks pretty dismantleable to me. In fact it's trying to dismantle itself just because I'm looking at it.

The object here is to create a frame to coil the wire in so that it stays nice and neat.

If you put a little space under the disks, it should be possible to add some tape before we start winding the coil to hold it together even better. At least that's what those well designed coil makers have.

So if we poke something through from the back, we should be able to stick the tape onto it to allow us to draw it through.

This gives us a bed of sticky side up tape to lay the coil over.

Once it's through, you can hold the tape and the device in your left hand and add coils of wire with your right hand.

When you have added the desired number of coils you can mess about in such a was as to fold the tape over the coil before you dismantle the device.

The plan here is to avoid this.

Its best to work with a real friend, unlike the imaginary one I retain.

Thanks for nothing Ted.

Oddly enough, it all seemed to work pretty well.

I successfully made three neat and well formed coils.

One each of 25 turns, 50 turns, and 100 turns.







That is, it worked quite well until the making the electricity bit.

That bit didn't go so well.

Magnet wanger no flash

Magnet wanger with flash

I made a magnet wanger to make the magnets wang around really fast, but for some reason I registered only .2 of a volt

Here is the magnet rotating device (a stick with a magnet stuck to it attached to a motor) pictured top without the flash, and bottom, with flash to freeze the image so you can tell its there.

The bit of wood sticking out to the left holds the magnet. All the other tackle is as counter-balance to stop all the stuff on my desk from vibrating away. Unbalanced motors vibrate a lot.


The point here is that I had the magnet spinning over the coils very fast and quite close and got as close to zero result as I could, without simply not turning up on the day.

In the first test I did, I spoke of the electrons surging around within the coil. Those were my words, but I'm not sure I understood them. What if it wasn't just the magnet passing first on side of the coil then the other, but the simultaneous passing of the south pole on one side and the north pole on the other. Magnets have poles by the way. Actually I read they don't and magnetic poles are an illusion, but the site I read that on was way out of my league, so for now I'm sticking with "Magnets have poles". Sometimes illusions are handy.

So things that I might have done wrong possibly include, but are not necessary restricted to...

1. I used less magnets than my first attempt. Perhaps this arrangement wasn't powerful enough.
2. I had only one magnet. Perhaps I need a north and a south pole hitting opposite sides of the coil.
3. I had less turns on my coils. Even the biggest one had only 100. My first attempt had 157.
4. Perhaps my magnet was passing the coil slower. Or too fast???
5. Something/everything else

Its possible that there is a certain threshold below which you get nada, then suddenly you make some power. Some things work like that. I can't think of anything that works like that, but there must be some things that do.

Whatever it is, rest assured, I'll get to the bottom of it. I often finish what I start.