Bedini Capacitive Discharge Chargers

[Aaron]

reform the battery

If the battery is not damaged and is really in good shape, I would take it off the SG, charge it to 14+ with a normal hot charger until good and full. Then drain it with a resistive load down to 12, do that a couple times. Then as soon as it is drained, then hook it to the sg charger.

The battery just may need to be reformed.

[Aaron]

sg info?

Ewhaz, with my 2000 turn trifilar on the bicycle wheel, charging caps with mechanical switch discharge, a few hours they would have a really good strong charge.

What are the coil and components you're using? Magnets, rotor size, caps you're charging. Your doing discharge with a 555 circuit? What voltage are caps before you discharge?

[Ewhaz]

Taking too long to charge?

I've been running my system for a few weeks now, and its taking an amazingly long time to charge these batteries.

I'm using two 8AH batteries, and its taking it like 3 days to get them up .6 v.. Is there anything I'm doing wrong?

[Aaron]

Bedini SG Bicycle Wheel Dual Battery Charger

Here was my original bicycle wheel setup:



I showed a zoom in pic at top left of my mechanical switch.... leads are alligator clips holding thin strips of copper sticking up. The pulley has another strip of copper taped to it and bent just right so that when it comes around counterclockwise, it will gently and evenly scrape both strips making the connection discharging the caps to the charging battery. I know a few people copied my switch and found that it worked great. When I used bigger batts and large cap banks, the exact switch worked perfectly. This is the discharge switch where I could charge for a while, turn everything off and the batt(s) would continue to charge for up to an hour with no more input.

[Aaron]

Bedini SG Dual Battery Charger

Dual Battery Charger

Here is the original schematic from about 7 years ago or so



Here is one my friend and I built virtually identical to every single spec on the drawing...they way John recommends starting out. Except we had the pulley a little bigger to let the caps get higher. It was the first time I think I ever tried to charge a battery with the SG's. You can see a folded piece of lead sheet on the left...that is wrapped around the battery I was charging in case it blew up.

[Ewhaz]

Messed up...

Drat.. I was using my charger, wondering why it was taking quite so long to charge.. Well I found out my circuit wasn't triggering properly. I tracked it down to the 555 and replaced it (damn glad I ordered extra) and now it seems to be oscillating properly. Now when the unit runs it has a chirping sound rather than the mosquito buzz. Hopefully It's working now. I'm having a hard time determining if the optocoupler is triggering properly but I do believe it's working for the simple fact that the coil is chirping. From previous experiments while I was assembling this thing, I know it would change pitch when the battery was hooked up on the charging side. If there weren't any connected, it would simply arc through the neon bulb I have there. The neon bulb now flashes, so I'm assuming this means the circuit is being interrupted between the battery and the capacitor.

Unfortunately my capacitors are overheating again, ARG! it's not as bad as it was before but definitely very warm to the touch.. I don't know why it's doing that though, I thought previously it was because the frequency is too high, now its at the right frequency but it's getting way too hot still. There's no such thing as a capacitor with a heat sink.

Update:

I Did a little research on temperature ranges for capacitors. It seems that the lowest I've seen them rated at is about 85 C (Or about 185F) and 105c is about the highest.

The pain threshold is between 54 to 55 C (About 130 F) so as long as it stays cool enough to touch without getting burned, the capacitor should be within it's operational range (Though with some loss to lifetime). However, its always better to be safe than sorry, always use caution when dealing with capacitors as they can explode.

[Ewhaz]

I'm going to repost my question here about the batteries, due to the fact that this circuit is not the SSG but rather the self oscilatting circuit with the capacitive discharge.

I spent the day running my system the other day, a total of 12 hours overall. Right off the bat the battery jumped to 13.25 v within 30 mins and then from there simply steadily charged till it got to about 13.97v

The power battery started at 12.66v and dropped to 12.26v for a total drop of .4 v. The charging battery went from 13.25v to 13.97v for a total gain of .72v

Now admittedly the batteries were new, and I didn't discharge the first battery before I put it on the system, so the readings are probably anomalous.

When I swap the batteries, I need to dishcarge the rest of the power battery before I can charge it, I'm assuming that discharging it to 12v is what I'm looking for before it's ready for charging again?

Since I didn't get over the 13.97 volts the other night, I hooked up my charger again.. this time the voltage jumped from 13.45v at the start and shot strait up to 15 volts. I don't want to overcharge or damage the battery so I'm assuming thats where I want to stop?

Reading some of the posts at pewski, there was a message from Bedini or bearden, they mentioned that what would happen is that the battery would peak and then drop slightly after it had been conditioned, basically achieving a steady platue of charging after that, slightly less than the peak. The battery reaching 15 volts so early seems unusual, how long should it take a battery to become conditioned in on this circuit?

[ren]

Mouser Electronics - Electronic Component Distributor

has them in stock. Or google semiconductor supplies, there are a heap of online sites that will offer postage options.

[Ewhaz]

Any place to get the 2n3584 transistor

Man this transistor must be in short supply around the world! Hardly ANY one carries it and they are either charging too much or out of stock! The company I ordered mine from have had my order on back order for over 2 months!

Does any one know where I can get this 2N3584 transistor from? It's like the Very last piece I'm waiting on in order to finish my charger! Thanks in advance.

Alternative: Any compatible transistors that can be used instead of this one, preferably one that is more available?

[splocal]

Thanx for the tips That is much cheaper than the 30$ caps i saw. thanx again!

[elias]

10,000uF capactors at 16v are rather cheap

I bought about ten 16v, 10,000uF rubycon capacitors while paying about 3$ for all of them. This is a cheap option too, if high voltage capacitors are not required.

[Aaron]

big caps

I found most of these 30,000 uf caps on ebay. I paid about $6 each. If you want to get really high capacitance caps, you can probably find them at car stereo shops, they might be kind of spendy. Probably will save quite a bit just paralleling some 30k uf's.

[splocal]

cap charging

If that question was for me, anytime I discharged only a few volts above the battery, it was using 60v caps and each cap was 30,000uf. I had about 6 of them in parallel for about 180,000uf.

I was hoping anyone with experience would respond so thank you Aaron. I know you have been involved with this work for some time! That is great news maybe I miss read your previous post I thought it was one cap at 180000 uf. 30000 uf caps are much easier to find. I have noticed that even with out the caps I sometimes have received a "fluffy" charge. voltage looks good but battery load is weak. Maybe I need to tune my SG better, I am definatly going to try the caps thanx again!

[Ewhaz]

Well, the unit is switching at like 2khz at least so maybe it's just a matter of the frequency. As I said the cap is holding at 55 to 60V with this setup.

The 555 timer set up seems it would work closer to 14hz.. so thats a HUGE difference.

But there is one thing I noticed however. Despite the fact the Cap is holding at 55v the battery still only shows maybe a volt or two above charge. I'm sure the internal impedance of the battery might have something to do with this.

[Aaron]

discharging caps

If that question was for me, anytime I discharged only a few volts above the battery, it was using 60v caps and each cap was 30,000uf. I had about 6 of them in parallel for about 180,000uf. The discharge for this setup was by mechanical pulley triggering a copper sheet switch that I made. This is the setup that allowed my charging batteries continue to charge/climb for up to an hour after there was no more input from the caps. This makes for a good strong charge.

The only time I used a neon bulb to discharge was on very, very low capacitance caps like 1uf, 0.1uf, 0.01uf and the caps were like 600volts. The voltages on this low of capacitance rose to the neon trigger voltage pretty easy. This setup was charging batts with too much radiant...not enough current to really get the batteries in true charging mode. The voltage climbs but it is really a fluffy electrostatic charge.

I never had capacitors get hot in either situation.